It would be a whole lot easier for folks to just say what they really mean: I need to get re-elected in a red district, my constituents love Donald Trump, and I don't want to get primaried. If you just said that, you wouldn't have to dissemble on television for nine minutes about how you've visited facilities housing migrant children at the border, and conditions weren't that bad when you visited, and the men and women of the Border Patrol are doing their best in an impossible situation.

Some of what Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican, told Chris Hayes on MSNBC Monday night is true: in many cases, Border Patrol agents are doing their best with limited resources. When Burgess visited child-detention facilities operated by the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement, they may very well have met humanitarian standards. After all, those facilities are not the ones that have been in the news in recent weeks over reports of the appalling conditions inside.

It's Border Patrol facilities that lawyers have visited recently and reported ten-year-old children taking care of two-year-old children they just met, surviving in squalid conditions without beds or soap or time outdoors. In one facility, attorneys reported the water tastes like bleach. These are the reports Hayes asked the congressman about, and which Burgess dodged by pivoting, time after time, to discussing different facilities.

But even with the ORR facilities, Burgess felt the need to go a step further in his praise.

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I’ve been to Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas. Yes, it’s a restored Walmart. You know what, there is not a lock on the door. Any child is free to leave at any time, but they don’t. You know why? Because they’re well taken care of. At some point, they’re going to live with family, generally not mother or father, but some family member. That’s a good thing.

These are kids. They cannot just walk out into the street. Even 15-year-old children cannot just be released into Texas, which is why, as Burgess pointed out, authorities put time and effort into placing children with relatives and do a thorough background check on those relatives beforehand. (Hayes pointed out there are reports that unaccompanied children's parents or relatives have not even been contacted even when they've been in government custody for some time.) This salvo has more than a little of Laura Ingraham's sociopathic "summer camps" spiel from last year to it. The kids are not staying there because they're having a grand old time. They have to.

(Also, this is not a luxury allowed for adults. A transgender woman, Johana Medina León, followed official protocols to apply for asylum but was nonetheless detained for a month. She grew sick in ICE custody, but was repeatedly denied medical care, according to The Guardian. León was a nurse back in El Salvador and knew how ill she was—to the point she asked to be deported in order to get care somewhere else after guards refused to even give her "water, sugar and salt so she could make her own IV." The deportation request was denied, and ICE only released her when she became even more seriously ill. León died of pneumonia on June 1.)

A bus transporting immigrants leaves a temporary facility at a US Border Patrol Station in Clint, Texas, on June 21, 2019. Lawyers who toured the facility said they witnessed inhumane conditions of overcrowding. PAUL RATJE Getty Images

But the real Trumpian flavor came when Hayes attempted to force Burgess to discuss the issue at hand: the Border Patrol facilities, not the ORR ones. For reference, here's The New York Times' account of the Clint, Texas, facility.

Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap...

[Attorney Elora Mukherjee] said the conditions in Clint were the worst she had seen in any facility in her 12-year career. “So many children are sick, they have the flu, and they’re not being properly treated,” she said. The Associated Press, which first reported on conditions at the facility earlier this week, found that it was housing three infants, all with teen mothers, along with a 1-year-old, two 2-year-olds and a 3-year-old. It said there were dozens more children under the age of 12.

Ms. Mukherjee said children were being overseen by guards for Customs and Border Protection, which declined to comment for this story. She and her colleagues observed the guards wearing full uniforms — including weapons — as well as face masks to protect themselves from the unsanitary conditions...

“The children are locked in their cells and cages nearly all day long,” Ms. Mukherjee said. “A few of the kids said they had some opportunities to go outside and play, but they said they can’t bring themselves to play because they are trying to stay alive in there.”

But when Hayes asked repeatedly about these conditions, and whether Burgess found them acceptable, he just kept pivoting away. Until he finally, backed into a corner, more or less dismissed it as Fake News driven by Trump Hatred.

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HAYES: You think this is fictional?

BURGESS: I don’t know if it’s hyperbole. I know that the hatred for this president is so intense, people are liable to say anything. I got to go look for myself and see for myself.

He admitted he had not been to the Clint facility, but dismissed reports from the many attorneys who have visited as Fake. And then, when Hayes described the outbreaks of lice and the flu afflicting young children, Burgess dismissed that:

BURGESS: Wait a minute. Those children arrived with the lice and are properly cared for.

HAYES: You don't know that.

BURGESS: I do. Yeah. You see it.

HAYES: No, you do not know that. They contracted the flu in the facility, is the reporting that we have.

BURGESS: No, it is not true. When I went down to McAllen, I went down there—

HAYES: You were not in the facility, sir. I just talked to the lawyer who was just in Clint, Texas. You just told me you're not in Clint, Texas. You don't know what they got there or not.

And then Burgess went back to talking about McAllen—which has had its own issues. Because he does not want to talk about the issues at hand. Because even though Barack Obama built out this system to deal with an influx of Central American migrants—mostly unaccompanied children—in 2014, the Trump administration is now responsible for it. And there are legitimate questions about whether the regime is making the conditions rougher than necessary as a deterrent—to communicate to desperate people fleeing violence and persecution that they are not welcome here. They are Undesirables. Burgess doesn't want to talk about that.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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