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Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials defended the conditions in immigrant detention facilities by comparing them to “summer camp” while speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. “I’m very comfortable with the level of service and protection that is being provided,” said one top ICE official, who later said that the “family residential centers” were “more like a summer camp.” The officials also defended the major delays in family reunification by saying that agencies had to improvise a system last minute under a judge’s orders. “This is a novel situation,” a public-health official involved in the reunification process said. “The systems were not set up to have referrals include parent information.”
The Post notes that these defenses “dumbfounded” Democratic congressmen, including one who reportedly argued that “children’s entertainment venue Chuck E. Cheese had a better system for preventing children from being separated from their parents than the U.S. government.” Another took issue with the officials’ apparent shirking of responsibility, and noted that the administration’s zero-tolerance policy was directly responsible for sparking the more than 2,500 family separations. “Blame other people if you wish,” he said, “but this started with somebody in the White House with a bright idea that turned out to be a disaster.”