Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on Wednesday traveled across the southern border to help five women present themselves for asylum in the U.S.
Booker, in a series of tweets, shared the “profoundly alarming” stories of five women, writing, “These are my observations. Please don’t look away.”
Booker wrote that one woman said she spent one month in detention while she was seeking asylum. He added that the woman said people in the detention center had to stand in the sun all day without food and sometimes without water.{mosads}
Booker continued, writing that one woman — whose name he did not share “out of concern for her safety” — left her home under threat of rape. “Like thousands of others, under the Trump Administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, she is stuck in limbo in Mexico,” he wrote.
One woman reportedly told Booker she was so hungry while in detention that she “would eat the peel of the orange.”
The presidential candidate added that one woman told him she had bruises across her back “from sleeping on the hard floor of the detention center.”
“She wasn’t able to shower for over 20 days and has rashes on her skin from the lack of sanitation,” Booker tweeted.
Booker said he helped the women present themselves for asylum with Families Belong Together and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which provides legal services to migrants. The senator said Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center would “monitor” the women throughout the process of applying for asylum to ensure they can remain in the U.S.
The senator called seeking asylum a “legal right” and said it “shouldn’t take a member of Congress to help people cross into our country.”
“This is a crisis that demands an urgent answer. God-willing we will answer that call with the change that we need and the fight to make it happen,” Booker wrote.
“These stories are profoundly alarming, but my words can’t begin to capture the pain. Their very human dignity is under assault, and it’s being done in our name,” he wrote.
The Trump administration has faced intensifying backlash in recent weeks over reported conditions in migrant detention centers.
An internal watchdog report released this week found detained migrants are living in dismal conditions in federal detention facilities.
A report released earlier Wednesday from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General described squalid and overcrowded conditions at detention centers while reporting little progress in recent months by Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection, its parent agency.
President Trump has dismissed lawmakers’ furor, blaming Democrats and existing immigration laws for ongoing issues at the border.