At the Border, Lawmakers See a Broken System and Little Common Ground
EL PASO — The delegation of Democratic lawmakers jostled for space in the cramped room in the border processing center, straining to hear over the sounds of crinkling mylar blankets and a crying baby, as a Venezuelan migrant told her grim story.
They listened sympathetically as the woman told of the weeks she would have to spend in Mexico before her next asylum hearing, at which she would try to explain the violence she had faced at home that had forced her to leave.
"You should not have to go back to Venezuela," Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey and a former State Department official, said, his voice tight with anger. "And you should not be stuck in Mexico. I think we all would agree with those two statements."
Hours before, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, had posted a video on Twitter from a different Border Patrol facility in Texas, offering a rosier picture of what was happening to migrants at the border.
"It's basically a Walmart," he said, gesturing across neatly organized crates of toothpaste and soap. "It's incredible how well we're treating people who are here illegally, how well we're taking care of them."
The two disparate reactions reflect the opposing poles of an intractable immigration debate that has raged ever more intensely in recent months, as President Trump's policies have grown more aggressive and migrant detention facilities have strained under the burden.
In the past six months, dozens of members of Congress and their aides have descended upon the southwestern border in an effort to see what is happening there. To witness the visits is to understand the nub of the deep divide over how to repair the nation's broken immigration system.
The fact-finding tours, detailed in interviews with more than two dozen lawmakers and aides, are sometimes sanitized for the V.I.P.s who take them, as the Trump administration works to put the best face on an often inhumane situation. But they have yielded moments of raw emotion and glimpses of human suffering that have prompted passionate testimony, viral videos of lawmakers on their tours, new legislative proposals and, in one case, a book.
Every lawmaker who makes the trek south agrees on the system's dysfunction, but few emerge with changed minds or drastically different perspectives. The bigger question of how to avoid having the immigration crisis once again languish remains unanswered.
The Democrat-led House this week approved two bills largely on party lines that would hold the Department of Homeland Security to higher accountability and medical standards for immigrant holding facilities, but its chances in the Republican-held Senate are slim to none. And in a committee hearing over funding the border, senators clashed over how much money to give to the president's wall at the southwestern border, even after the chamber's majority voted to end his national emergency declaration there.
"The goal was, everybody could see it and say, ‘O.K., we've all seen it. We can come to a common set of conclusions on how to be able to resolve it,'" Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, said of his recent visit to the border. "But I'm not hearing that."
"Maybe, lessons learned."
What lawmakers take away from the border usually depends on what they are looking for.
Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, organized multiple summer trips focusing on the enforcement side, giving lawmakers the chance to tour fragments of Mr. Trump's border wall and to speak with local law enforcement, as well as with property owners whose land runs close to the border.
Democrats tend to focus instead on the humanitarian side. Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas has led several groups to her El Paso district, organizing interviews with migrants detained in Juárez, Mexico, and taking her colleagues to the road between the two countries.
There are politics involved even in the rosters of the groups. In July, Senate Democrats refused to join Vice President Mike Pence and Republican senators for a trip to a facility in McAllen, Tex., ultimately fearing, in the words of Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, "getting overwhelmed by Pence and his public relations."
"There's a tension here between Trump supporters and critics, Republicans and Democrats, about these detainees and the people who are in the process," Mr. Durbin said. "This tension is going on between humane treatment and deterrence."
Even trips like the one taken by the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, where Republicans and Democrats huddled afterward to share impressions and ideas, have done little to move the dialogue forward.
Outside the Border Patrol's central processing center in McAllen, Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, recounted a conversation he had in broken Spanish with a Salvadoran woman about her 5-year-old daughter. While the girl had told Mr. Schatz she had just eaten, her mother told him that was not true.
"She said, ‘She's not eating,'" Mr. Schatz said, choking back tears. "These kids are being traumatized, and they're doing it on purpose," he said of the Trump administration.