The Associated Press published a report Sunday evening describing chain-link partitions within a U.S. Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, as “cages” — while other news organizations described them as “fences.”
The facility is a converted warehouse where families arrested for crossing the border illegally are held temporarily. Children who arrive with adults that are being prosecuted are often separated, to be sent to shelter facilities. The fences are considered necessary to separate men and women, and children from adults, for the migrants’ safety.
Here is how the Los Angeles Times (hardly a conservative outlet), which visited the same facility on the same day, described the partitions (emphasis added):
A baby boy cried as he was carried past chain-link holding areas in the Border Patrol processing center in McAllen, Texas, on Sunday morning, a sprawling former warehouse, the largest of its kind on the border.
…
In the center, parents were lying shoulder to shoulder on green pallets with their children. The room was spare, with bare concrete floors and guard towers, but clean.
The 72,000-square-foot building has about 300 staff members, with a medical unit, portable bathrooms and showers. It’s separated into cells and four large holding areas, all cordoned off by cyclone fence.
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