President Joe Biden's administration "broke the law right away" by enforcing a 100-day moratorium on most deportations because of actions the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security took before former President Donald Trump left office, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Wednesday.
"At the very end of the Trump administration, [Texas Attorney] General Ken Paxton worked out an agreement with the Trump administration and Homeland Security that no changes to the policy on immigration on any part of it could change without a 180-day notice to the state of Texas," Patrick said on Fox News' "The Faulkner Focus." "Anything that Biden wants to do, we need a six-month minimum notice before he can do it."
Late Tuesday, a federal judge banned the moratorium, issuing a preliminary injunction that Texas had sought that argued the plan both violated federal law and would impose extra costs on the state.
Paxton on Wednesday also hit back at critics of the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, where immigrant children and families are held and denied that children there are "in cages."
"They stay in rooms," he said. "Six bunks to a room, television, three meals a day. They have school, they have a soccer field. It is an absolute 180-degree lie of that [from what] AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and anyone from the left says."
He acknowledged that there are "some holding cells" but insisted that when children are sent to the center "they're transferred to an incredible facility."
Trump and Biden are both being criticized about the facility, but Paxton insisted that it "is nicer than some of our public school facilities where children are," he insisted.
Patrick added that often, children cross the border with someone who is not their parent, often a male adult, who is sent back across the border.
"A lot of them have a piece of paper to go to this uncle or aunt somewhere in," said Patrick. "We don't know who these people are. We have to protect these children from child predators."
Trump's plan was "working well," he added, and Biden must return to that.
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