And Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., is wondering just what it is that the Obama administration's Health and Human Services Department is trying to hide.
In an interview with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, he described how he went to Fort Sill, which is in the state he represents. He visited with the commander, then went to look at a barracks where HHS had taken over operations and is housing some of the illegal alien children who have arrived on the U.S. border.
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But he was refused entry.
The illegal alien crisis is being blamed on President Obama's deferred action program for illegal alien youth. The apparent understanding outside of the U.S. is that if illegal alien minors can reach the United States, they will be given all sorts of benefits.
The result is that parents in Central America are spending thousands of dollars to pay traffickers who haul their children to the U.S.-Mexican border.
Estimates are that tens of thousands of children already have arrived and more are en route.
WND reported earlier that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, reported on the atrocities.
Cruz's statement came in a news conference after he, Rep. Michael C. Burgess, R-Texas, and others visited a dorm at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas that serves as a temporary home to some of the tens of thousands of children who have been delivered to the U.S. border, mostly from Central America.
"We just heard stories of little boys and little girls forced by these drug dealers to cut off the fingers or cut off the ears of other little boys and girls in order to extort money from their families," Cruz said.
"These children are told if you don't cut off the fingers or ears of another child, you'll be shot," he said. "You can imagine your child going through the hell that these kids have gone through. … You can't help but lift these kids up in prayer … [and want to] change the legal system that is encouraging what is happening here."
Burgess also told WND that the accounts of the atrocities the children endured appeared genuine, as they were related by a federal Department of Homeland Security worker in the facility set aside now for children.
But Bridenstine said he was alarmed that HHS was "denying me access to a federal facility in my state."
He cited the reports about what the children are going through and said he wanted to visit to talk with them, and see what's been happening.
"What is it they're trying to hide," he asked, citing the "devastating stories" that so far have been reported. He cited reports of "rape and abuse."
Bridenstine, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he's previously visited all such facilities in the state.
He said the barracks taken over by HHS was surrounded by a chain link fence draped with a material so no one can see it.
"All we wanted to do was find out who was running the facility, talk to them," he told Van Susteren."
He was told he could return on July 21 for a visit.
The congressman blamed the problem directly on Obama.
He said he's visited Central America many times, and "the crime is not worse than it's ever been. Neither is the poverty."
"Do they not want the children to speak with members of Congress? As a Navy pilot, I have been involved in operations countering illicit human trafficking. I would like to know to whom these children are being released."
Both crime and poverty are excuses given why so many children are being shipped to the U.S. border.
"What's different is this president's policies," he said. He's been advertising to the world, "If you come you won't be sent home," the congressman said.
The problem has nothing to do with comprehensive immigration reform, he said.
"There is no excuse for denying a federal representative from Oklahoma access to a federal facility in Oklahoma where unaccompanied children are being held," Bridenstine said earlier in a prepared statement. "Any member of Congress should have the legal authority to visit a federal youth detention facility without waiting three weeks."
WND reported earlier on the comments from Cruz and Burgess:
Burgess explained what the human traffickers in Mexico are doing, and why the reported threats exist.
"They charge a lot of money and families that aren't able to pay, or continue the payments, or make the payments ... are threatened," Burgess said.
"The children may be then compelled to cut off a finger or an ear of another child," he said the delegation was told.
The message is: "This is what happens if you don't pay your debts."
Burgess, who wrote "Doctor in the House," detailing common sense solutions to the nation's health care problems, said the delegation took the federal employee at his word.
The flood of illegal-alien minors is being triggered by Obama's recent renewal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Burgess said.
WND reported earlier that members of Congress say there's no doubt the Obama administration intentionally prompted the flood of illegal aliens, based on a strategy by two radical sociologists who wanted to transform America into a socialist state.
In the 1960s, professors Andrew Cloward and Francis Fox Piven of Columbia University, Obama's alma mater, devised a plan to provoke chaos by deliberately overwhelming governmental systems and the U.S. economy to the point of collapse, paving the way for state intervention that would ultimately replace America's free-enterprise republic with a collectivist system.
"I do feel this attempt to flood the border with illegals is a playing out of the Cloward-Piven theory," said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.
"If you don't see them bring reinforcements down there to seal the border, that means that, yes, it's a Cloward-Piven maneuver to flood the country until we get to the point where we are an open-borders country that welcomes everybody, legal and illegal," he told WND.
Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, agreed that Obama – who studied the chaos strategy at Columbia, according to a classmate – "is trying to do a Cloward-Piven thing with the border."
"Obama follows all the far-left, Leninist, socialist-type stuff," Stockman told WND.
He said it's "an open secret Obama is trying to flood Texas with illegals to make it into a blue state," with a Democrat majority.
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