James O’Keefe of Project Veritas released photographs Monday from inside a border facility in Texas where migrant children are being held — and taunted the White House as he did so, for denying the media access to such facilities for weeks.
As Breitbart News has reported, President Joe Biden and his administration have denied the media access to border facilities even during tours by senior administration officials, even restricting officials from sharing information with reporters.
In 2014, Breitbart News broke the story of children being held in Border Patrol facilities, which was the first report on the crisis of unaccompanied minors arriving at the southern border.
On Monday morning, Axios released the first photographs from the present wave, noting that the photographs came from Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX). That apparently prompted O’Keefe to release his own photographs and video footage, which he did on social media and at the Project Veritas website.
As he did so, O’Keefe called out White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, who has repeatedly deflected questions from the media about when journalists would be allowed to visit the border facilities to see the conditions for themselves.
Last Thursday, Psaki continued to claim that “the White House and we all in the administration support finding a way to grant access to the media,” but declined to do so, even as she continued to defend Biden’s commitment to transparency.
As recently as Sunday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was claiming that the reason the media had not yet been allowed to tour the migrant facilities was because of concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.
Both the Trump administration and the Obama administration had allowed the media access to the migrant facilities. The media and the Democratic Party opposition cited the facilities in condemning Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.