Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel told a story about “right-wing anti-immigration” Hungary being unwilling to separate immigrant children from their families.
Engel said, “What I haven’t seen before is this family separation. As I was there in Central America, watching the people try to leave, watching them be deported back home, I remembered covering this massive migration crisis that was in Europe a few years ago, and we saw lots and lots of refugees and lots and lots of migrants, but we didn’t see authorities deliberately separating people from families. They didn’t see it as necessary and productive.”
He continued, “I was in Hungary, and Hungary has most aggressive, hardline, anti-immigration crisis and people are coming into Hungary, and I remember one moment that is seared in my brain, they were on the bus and people on the bus started becoming hysterical. They were shouting and under guard but they were very agitated. What happened is one of the family members on the bus had gotten separated from their child so everybody on the bus started to scream. The bus stopped. They opened the windows and people on the ground raised the child, raised the baby on to the bus so the family could stay together and the family drove off, the bus drove off. So even in Hungary that has one of the most right-wing anti-immigration governments in the world right now, they were stopping the busses and making sure the people could be reunited with their families because they didn’t want to inflict any more trauma on to the people, so they could control the situation and not cause unnecessary agitation and stress.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN