Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's Morning Joe to discuss the aftermath of the death of a seven-year-old girl in Border Patrol custody, MSNBC correspondent Cal Perry slammed the Trump administration as making it "normal" for there to be "children dying in the desert."
And, a bit later, correspondent Julia Ainsley suggested that the Trump administration forced migrants to illegally cross the border through the desert because entry through legal ports is not fast enough.
At 6:46 a.m. Eastern, Perry declared:
The bottom line is this: The President has told people to go to ports of entry. Customs and Border Patrol is saying basically the shining city on a hill which is El Paso is full, and so you have this deep contradiction and messages continuing to be sent from this administration around the world that basically the country is closed.
The MSNBC correspondent then bemoaned:
The things that should not be normal, Mika -- children with numbers on their arms, children dying in the desert, children being held in a tent facility in El Tornillo, Texas, able to speak to their lawyers only 20 minutes a week -- these things are becoming normal by this administration which continues to shape policy on the fly without any transparency.
A bit later, Ainsley asserted that the Trump administration has been "self-inflicting their own wounds."
She continued:
A lot of this has to do with Trump administration policy. not to put more people at the border who can process asylum claims, who can provide medical care. Remember this girl did not receive medical care until an hour and a half after a bus ride to a larger facility. They are not putting those kind of people down there. Instead, they're trying to build a wall. They're not putting down humanitarian aid -- they're putting down troops. We can see these decisions being made over and over again.
Ainsley then complained:
We've seen barriers be built in the past, and what it does is it forces more people to make the dangerous treks like Jakelin and her father had to make. it leads to more deaths. It's called a deterrent strategy, and they build these barriers which forces them through these places.
