‘Part of the stench’: CNN’s Anderson Cooper skewers Mike Pence for ‘awkwardly chuckling’ at talk of neglected migrant kids

While Presiden Donald Trump has been trying to drum up fears about a crisis driven by waves of immigrants trying to invade the United States, the real crisis is a humanitarian one that forced many asylum seekers from Central America to leave their homes in the first place. And that humanitarian crisis continues on American soil in the camps and detention centers where children and others are being held in horrendous conditions, as many recent reports have documented.

CNN”s Anderson Cooper reflected on the crisis and the administration’s attempts to shift the blame to others on his show Tuesday night.

He noted that, in one powerful piece by the New York Times documenting the unsanitary and unsafe conditions of the migrants are forced to live in, Director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic Elora Mukherjee said, “There is a stench.” The children at these facilities were unable to clean themselves, she explained, though Cooper noted that the “stench” is also a metaphor for the administration’s disastrous handling of the situation.

View the complete June 26 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.