MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid and NBC News reporter Cal Perry toured one of the government tent cities established for the children the government has taken from their parents, and joined Lawrence O'Donnell to share their impressions.
Cal Perry described the tents as "an operating base you would see in Iraq." He noted that the children are treated in a militarized manner, as if given "the orders of the day in a schedule in a very militarized zone."
They were not allowed to see the girls, but two girls were permitted to come out and see them. Perry described them as having a "look of shell shock, this look like they were no longer blinking."
"You look at them and thought what did they go through walking here and now what are they going through in this military facility," he wondered, as he described a striking drawing from a girl who said she walked all the way from Honduras. She walked. All that way.
But wait, there's more.
"I think the other thing I was struck by, I think the U.S. Government is disappearing kids, they're doing it in the middle of the night," he said, with some stress in his voice. "I think the administration is going to see this video we played out and they're going to move the kids to a military base and become military detainees, these children and we're going to lose complete access and we're going to have to rely on whistleblowers who know now is the time to stand up and be counted."
It's not every day you hear a reporter stand up and say something like that. In other times, a Congressional hearing would already be underway, but we are not living in ordinary times.
Reid also had a heartbreaking observation about how the kids are moved around the country. Apparently when a toddler or very young child needs a bed at a facility far away, they have to remove one of the kids they've already placed to make room.
"When a baby had to be moved in or a toddler or little kid and the facility under the tent was not appropriate for a little kid they had to give up their bed and be moved from wherever they were in the country to that facility," she said. "So one of the things confounding to me was how we could have been told they know -- HHS knows where all the kids are, these are kids that have been moved at least once. they are being moved around the country and wound up in that camp."
In other words, they're lying to us about having a way to track those kids and they're lying to us about moving them around, confirming Perry's concerns.
I couldn't even process this next observation: "These kids have very little belongings and they're so aware of how they're moved around they're leaving behind the belongings they have for the next kid that comes to the camp," Reid told O'Donnell.
They leave their things behind for the next child. What is the government doing to these children? How do we make them stop? How will we ever reunite them?
