Homeland Security Secretary ‘Horrified’ By Images of Police Abusing Migrants

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Tuesday he was “horrified” by images showing US Border Patrol agents rounding up and verbally abusing Haitian refugees at the Southern Border.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar aired footage of officers on horseback charging migrants near Del Rio, Texas. There are thousands of migrants, many of them Haitian, who have settled at a campsite under the Del Rio International Bridge while they await processing.

“Any mistreatment or abuse of a migrant is unacceptable, is against border patrol policy, training, and our department’s values,” Mayorkas said. “Indeed we have directed an investigation, that investigation is underway and it will be conducted swiftly and the public needs and deserves to know its results.”

Keilar proceeded to air a video of an officer berating a migrant crossing the Rio Grande river.

“Hey, you use your women,” the agent on horseback yelled at the migrants. “This is why your country’s s**t, because you use your women for this!”

“I was horrified by what I saw,” Mayorkas said. “I’m going to let the investigation run its course. But the pictures that I observed troubled me profoundly. That defies all of the values that we seek to instill in our people.”

Mayorkas said the refugees who made the trip from Haiti to a camp site under the bridge in Texas had been “deceived” by “smuggling operations and misinformation” into making the trip “when we have been quite clear that it will not be successful and that is not what they should do.”

He said officials are working “very quickly” to process the migrants.

Watch above, via CNN.

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