This week, Jill Biden visited a refugee camp in Mexico, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. She became only the second high profile person connected with a Democratic presidential campaign to visit the camp. Julian Castro also visited back in October. After the visit Joe Biden’s wife remarked:
On Sunday, I walked across the Gateway International Bridge into Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico to meet with asylum seekers. I witnessed both the cruelty of our policy and the grace of acts of kindness.
Congressman Filemón Vela and I joined Team Brownsville and Sister Norma of Catholic Charities for a holiday Tamalada with the thousands of asylum seekers living in mud and tents by the U.S. border.
Over 2,000 migrants live in the camp — most of which are called MPPs, because they are forced to remain in Mexico as part of the Trump Administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols program — as they await their U.S. immigration hearings. This past year over 60,000 MPPs from California to Texas have been sent to wait in Mexico, Trump administration officials said recently.
Some of the families have been living in tents in this filthy and smelly encampment — at the base of the Gateway International Bridge — since mid-July when MPP was first implemented in South Texas.
What I saw firsthand was heartbreaking but the stories I heard from the women and children trying to survive was worse. This cruelty is not who we are. pic.twitter.com/9rGb1ypGZQ
— Dr. Jill Biden (@DrBiden) December 24, 2019
Jill Biden remarked: “Our nation was mostly built by immigrants and when we turn our backs on these families, it’s a stain on our national character. We cannot let this happen in our name.”
After seeing the story on Border Report’s website the Trump campaign sent a statement saying:
The “photo op with asylum seekers in Mexico highlights how far left Joe Biden has shifted away from the asylum and detention policies he touted just a few years ago.”
Watch more on the visit from the NBC affiliate in Brownsville, Texas above.