On Thursday morning, a reporter asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) what her party planned to do about writer E. Jean Carroll’s recent rape allegation against President Donald Trump.

Pelosi’s response was not a profile in courage.

“I haven’t spent any time on that,” she said, raising her arms in frustration. “I don’t know the people you’re referencing, I don’t know the person making the accusation. I haven’t paid that much attention to it.”

Not only was the top Democrat in Congress oddly unfamiliar with one of the biggest political stories of the past month, she did not believe her caucus had a responsibility to do anything about it.

“I don’t know what Congress’ role would be in any of this. But in any of these things, this isn’t about what Congress would do, this is about what the president’s own party would do. You’d really have to ask them. I’m busy worrying about children not being in their mothers’ arms,” she added.

That last bit was a reference to the other major political story of the past month ― the horrific conditions at overcrowded immigrant detention centers, where at least six child migrants have died in government custody since September.

But a few hours after Pelosi declared her devotion to the children suffering at the border, she deferred to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on their fate.

As horror stories detailing conditions at the border began piling up this week, McConnell passed a bipartisan bill expanding funding for Trump’s immigration authorities by $4.6 billion. Progressive Democrats in the House, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), wanted to include some basic humanitarian safeguards on that money, but Pelosi, citing resistance from self-described moderate Democrats, decided instead to just pass the Senate bill, no strings attached.

“We didn’t even bother to negotiate,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN, calling the bill “completely irresponsible to the American people and to those kids on the border.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was even more critical: “A vote for Mitch McConnell’s border bill is a vote to keep kids in cages and terrorize immigrant communities.”

The Trump administration’s immigration atrocities cannot, of course, be chalked up solely to financial constraints. Its flagshipimmigration-deterrencepolicy ― separating children from their parents ― was not adopted out of budgetary desperation. But under Pelosi’s guidance, the official Democratic Party response to the Trump administration abusing immigrant children is to give more money to the agencies the Trump administration relies on to abuse immigrant children.