The mayor of Murietta, Calif., where protests forced Border Patrol to reroute buses of migrant families and children to a San Diego processing center, on Sunday defended his town’s response to the overwhelming protests.
Mayor Alan Long distanced himself from the protests, explaining that the majority of protesters came from out of town and that police were not prepared for the volume of demonstrators.
“The world showed up on our doorstep,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Long said that the police were not equipped to deal with the protesters, and they were not able to bring in back-up before Border Patrol rerouted the buses. He said the plan the entire time was to “provide safety for everyone.”
He did however, voice his opinion on the conditions these migrants deal with in detention centers.
“What we object to, is we object to inhumane facilities,” he said. “Those are jail cells.”
CNN host Candy Crowley pressed the mayor on how the town would handle additional buses with migrant families.
“I guarantee you, if a bus were to arrive at the Murietta border patrol and those aliens were here, you would see that we would treat them with compassion. And the unfortunate part is that never occurred. This is a democracy, for whatever reason, the bus was turned around,” Long said. “I can’t speak for the rest of the world that showed up on our doorsteps.”
Long initially encouraged residents to protest the federal government’s decision to send undocumented immigrants to a detention facility in Murietta.
“Murrieta expects our government to enforce our laws, including the deportation of illegal immigrants caught crossing our borders, not disperse them into our local communities,” Long told residents on Monday.
This post has been updated.
