When Vice President Mike Pence stood before caged men at a detention center in McAllen, Texas last week, he saw nearly 400 men crowded together in spaces not big enough for them all to lie on the concrete ground. A stench of body odor hung in the air, and the men had to ask permission from Border Patrol agents to drink water, which was outside the fences.
Pence said the conditions belied an "overwhelmed" system.
But national security expert Juliette Kayyem said the system doesn't have to be, and said Pence's words show a purposeful obfuscation of the issue.
Kayyem wrote recently that while the chaos of the situation along the southern border has many fathers, the incompetence of the response has but one.
"You have however many people you need to hold in the United States, what's going on here that we're detaining them that way, because we don't have a supply chain problem in this country," she said on Boston Public Radio Wednesday. "I wanted to describe to people our ability, in a country that has roads, and WiFi, and electricity, and water, and food, that the solution to the detention condition problem, as compared to the border problem, is really one of logistics, and we know how to solve that."
Kayyem argued the conditions could easily be mitigated through supply chain solutions, but the administration is choosing not to.
"You can surge resources in a heartbeat," she said. "Therefore, why aren't they doing it? Cruelty is the point. They view cruelty as a deterrent."
Juliette Kayyem is an analyst for CNN, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, and faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
