El Paso-area Congressman Beto O’Rourke Thursday called on the United States to end the mass detention of undocumented immigrants. O’Rourke was joined by a handful of other Democrats in a Washington D.C. press conference. The Department of Homeland Security recently announced a number of reforms to improve the treatment of detainees. But O’Rourke said the system cannot be fixed and it is un-American.
An editorial earlier this month in the New York Times called for an end to mass immigrant detention.
It cited a recent report from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Center for Migration Studies. That report says the United States detained more than 440,000 immigrants in 2013….an enormous increase from just 85,000 detentions in 1995.