On Thursday, Secretary of Homeland Security—and wandering consonant victim—Kirstjen Nielsen put on a bravura display of bureaucratic pigheadedness in front of the House Judiciary Committee, culminating in this now-famous outburst of Hulkspeak.

"From Congress, I would ask for wall—we need wall."

Earlier, Nielsen admitted that she didn't know how many migrants had died in her custody, that she hadn't read the reports showing that recent immigrants commit fewer crimes than do native-born Americans, and that she was unclear how many legal ports of entry there were. She blamed her inability to answer the latter question on the lateness of the day. The banality of banality again.

Unfortunately for Nielsen, whose room at The Hague already may be booked, ProPublica on Friday produced a report that further undermines her bona fides both as a Cabinet secretary and as a human being.

Over the past six months, ProPublica has gathered hundreds of police reports detailing allegations of sexual assaults in immigrant children’s shelters, which have received $4.5 billion for housing and other services since the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America in 2014. The reports, obtained through public records requests, revealed a largely hidden side of the shelters — one in which both staff and other residents sometimes acted as predators.

Several of the incidents have led to arrests of shelter employees or teenage residents. And in one particularly heinous case, a youth care worker was convicted in September of molesting seven boys over nearly a year at an Arizona shelter. The employee had worked for months without a full background check...

Nielsen with outgoing House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte. Mark Wilson Getty Images

But ProPublica’s review of the hundreds of police reports showed something else about the assaults. Something that went beyond background checks. Kids at shelters across the country were, indeed, reporting sexual attacks in the shelters, often by other kids. But again and again, the reports show, the police were quickly — and with little investigation — closing the cases, often within days, or even hours.

And there are likely even more such cases. ProPublica’s cache of records is missing many police reports from shelters in Texas, where the largest number of immigrant children are held, because state laws there ban child abuse reports from being made public, particularly when the assaults are committed by other minors.

Make no mistake. These kids are incarcerated and these centers are jails. And Kirstjen Nielsen is responsible for everything that happens in them.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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