Steve King, a Member of Congress, Says He Drank Toilet Water at a Border Detention Facility
During a town hall in his Iowa district on Wednesday, Republican congressman Steve King tried a new strategy for proving that conditions in migrant detention camps at the border are not all that bad, despite condemnations by Democratic lawmakers and human rights activists. The toilet water inside, he explained, is quite clean—clean enough, perhaps, for a sitting member of the United States Congress to enthusiastically drink it.
"I actually went into that cell where it was reported that they were advised they had to drink out of the toilet," said King, as transcribed by NBC News's Maura Barrett, to his presumably-horrified audience. "I took a drink out of there. And actually, pretty good!"
King's reference here is to a visit from a Democratic congressional delegation to detention facilities in El Paso and Clint, Texas in July. Afterwards, New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters that prisoners inside said they hadn't been allowed to bathe for two weeks, and that people housed in a cell equipped with a broken sink were forced to drink out of the toilet bowl by Customs and Border Protection agents instead.
“Just left the 1st CBP facility. I see why CBP officers were being so physically & sexually threatening towards me," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. "Officers were keeping women in cells w/ no water & had told them to drink out of the toilets.” And she followed up on it, repeating that migrants were "drinking water out of the toilet" after some Republicans contended that the water was actually from a sink attached to the toilet. Others challenged the veracity of Ocasio-Cortez's statements altogether—like White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway, who called it an "outrageous claim"—but King chose a different tack.
At some point since—King did not share exactly when—he decided to investigate these claims during a border visit of his own. "I have a videotape," he said. "I smacked my lips." He added that he chose not to publish the evidence of what he called a "little personal experience" because, in his words, "I thought, 'You know, this subject just needs to go into the rearview mirror.'"
After NBC News's report, however, King released this video of the alleged toilet-drinking episode. In it, he does not in fact drink from the toilet, but instead takes a few gulps from the attached sink right over the toilet.
Notably, Kings's demonstration doesn't refute detainees' specific claims here, which were that they had to drink from the toilet because that attached sink was broken. Customs and Border Patrol officials, for example, could easily have repaired a temporarily-out-of-commission sink in the time that elapsed between Ocasio-Cortez's trip and King's. (Whether this clip corroborates his assertion that he "smacked his lips" in satisfaction is up to the viewer to decide.)
King, of course, has a lengthy history of saying and doing outrageous things on the subject of immigration. In 2013, he justified his opposition to policies like the DREAM Act by warning of undocumented immigrants with "calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert." In 2017, he casually tweeted that "we can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies," echoing a common racist conspiracy theory and leaving little doubt as to whom, exactly, "we" and "our" referred. Earlier this year, House Republicans stripped King of his committee assignments after a New York Times interview in which he wondered aloud when terms like "white nationalist," "white supremacist," and "Western civilization" became "offensive."
King isn't exactly alone in echoing white supremacist talking points. Wednesday's revelation, however, marks the first known instance of a nine-term lawmaker drinking from a detention center sink within a splash's reach from a toilet to make the point that migrants are treated humanely.
This post has been updated to incorporate information from King's video.
It is brutal. It is torture by definition. It destroys the mind, body, and soul, making rehabilitation next to impossible. It is also outrageously expensive, and it doesn't work. Yet at the end of the Obama era, and the dawn of Trump's, isolation is as widely used as ever in the American penal system. And this is what it feels like.
Originally Appeared on GQ
