Alyssa Milano: I tried to get into the Homestead housing center for immigrant kids but they wouldn't let me

Via the Blaze, what is this country coming to when Alyssa Milano can’t gain access to a government facility at a moment’s notice?

I can’t embed the video of her talking about this but clicking on the link in the tweet below will send you to it.

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It’s taken me two and a half years to process the fact that Trump is president and I still haven’t fully succeeded. Now I need to start processing the fact that Alyssa Milano is a powerbroker in the Democratic primaries:

Alyssa Milano arrived in Miami ahead of Wednesday night’s first Democratic presidential primary debate – and Sen. Bernie Sanders is aggressively seeking her endorsement, The Post has learned.

Sanders has personally phoned Milano several times in recent weeks in a bid win her backing, a source close to “Charmed” actress said.

“Of all the Democratic candidates, the one pounding down her door the hardest is Bernie Sanders,” the source said.

Socialism’s takeover of the United States may hinge on the approval of an entertainer whose most prominent credit is “Who’s the Boss?” Sanders isn’t the only candidate paying attention to her either. Remember, Milano was reportedly one of the people who twisted Joe Biden’s arm behind the scenes to drop his support for the Hyde Amendment. Winning the Alyssa Milano primary is a big deal in 2019, it seems. Which, on the one hand, is understandable as a matter of sheer social-media numbers: She has more than 3.5 million Twitter followers, nearly a million more than the Speaker of the House, and she’s highly politically active on her account.

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On the other hand, this is someone whose idea of activism is to call for a sex strike to protest abortion laws. She’s “Extremely Online,” as the kids like to say, both for good and for ill. But then, so is AOC and she has outsized influence in the Democratic Party too.

The Homestead facility she gatecrashed today is in south Florida, close enough to tonight’s debate that various Democratic candidates have swung by while they’re in town to register their concern and say some harsh things about Trump’s stubborn resistance to open borders. NPR published a warts-and-all backgrounder on Homestead back in February that’s worth your time. It’s the largest housing facility for migrant children in the U.S., it’s run for profit, and the kids obviously don’t want to be there. But it seems to be clean and well-kept, at least by the standards of immigration facilities. It’s not one of the places that’s been noted recently for lacking toothbrushes or making kids sleep on concrete floors. It’s not even really a detention center, notes Vox’s Dara Lind. It’s run by HHS and follows standard operating procedure in housing migrant children temporarily; it’s not some threadbare facility that the feds scrambled to assemble in order to cope with the current crisis. (It was opened by the Obama administration, in fact.) “If you’re going to go to an HHS facility that is in status quo the alternative to detention and characterize it as ‘detention,'” notes Lind, “it raises much bigger [questions] about what you think should happen instead.” Indeed. Democrats have a lot to say about immigration generally but not so much about the what-should-happen-instead part.

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It raises a question for Milano too. Considering that Homestead is by no means the worst of the worst and that it’s already received heavy media attention lately due to the visits from Democratic candidates, why did she choose to try to get in there instead of into one of those threadbare facilities? What “awareness” is she raising by showing up at Homestead? Did she simply go where the cameras were, or did she say to one of her PR people that she wanted to try to crash an immigration center, any immigration center, and they trouped off to the first one they thought of?

The latest prominent visitor to Homestead was Bernie Sanders’s wife Jane, who vowed that his very first act as president would be to shut down all government housing centers for migrant children. In lieu of an exit question, here’s Josh Hawley laying into his Democratic colleagues in Congress for bitching endlessly about how DHS is coping with the crisis while doing zippo to actually help. As for Milano, enjoy this emoting while it lasts: A completely inevitable side effect of Trump losing in 2020 will be all of this sudden liberal concern for how immigrants are treated disappearing into thin air.

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