More on Pence’s brief visit to Theresienstadt a border detention center yesterday:

Agents wore face masks, and video showed detainees packed into their holding areas surrounded by chain-link fence, the concrete floors littered with silver thermal blankets. Reporters accompanying Pence described the facility as smelling “horrendous.”

A group of men detained behind chain link fencing shouted to news cameras, “No shower, no shower!”

I wonder if this “no showers” thing is even more sinister than it looks at first blush. It’s bad enough if it’s just a matter of imprisoning non-criminals without sufficient planning and organization to provide humane conditions, but it’s worse if Trump and the gang are doing it on purpose. If the detainees smell horrendous then doesn’t that just do more to make onlookers think they’re bad smelly dirty people who should be punished for trying to get asylum here? Doesn’t it choke off fellow-feeling and empathy and replace it with revulsion?

I leave it to your wisdom to determine.

Pence said afterward that what he saw was evidence of a “system that was overwhelmed.”

The experience did not appear to temper a statement he made earlier in the day that reports of mistreatment, filthy conditions and lack of basic necessities were “slanderous.”

Yes, that’s the problem here, “slanderous” reporting as opposed to the horrific conditions being reported.

The remarks were made during a roundtable discussion held after Pence toured a temporary holding facility near Donna-Rio Bravo International Bridge in Texas.

At the 1,000-capacity facility in Donna, Texas, most of the detainees were lying on mats on the floor. The location held about 800 migrants.

“I couldn’t be more impressed with the compassionate work that our Customs and Border Protection are doing here at this border facility,” Pence said.

What a warm, compassionate, generous man he must be.

He said President Donald Trump sent him so “the American people could see what’s happening here.” A reporter on the tour was not allowed to speak to children or adults being held.

“It’s time we moved past the harsh rhetoric of the American left,” Pence said at the roundtable held in McAllen.

It’s the left’s fault for objecting to the bad conditions, it’s not the right’s fault for imposing the bad conditions. Shoot the messenger; that will fix everything.

“Every family that I spoke to told me that they are being well cared for,” he said.

Which is not at all because they’re afraid of the guards. Definitely not. It’s slanderous to say it is.

Hope Frye, a San Francisco immigration attorney who said she has toured all the federal migrant facilities in the Rio Grande Valley, was adamant that conditions have been deplorable.

“The idea that this is false or exaggerated is really offensive to me,” she said. “It’s like saying migrants’ voices are untrue. It all paints the same picture — depraved indifference to the safety and welfare of children who come to us and are put in our care.”

Depraved but Republican, so that’s ok then.

Lindsey Graham wants them to be tortured more.

“The problem we have here can be fixed, literally overnight,” Graham said.

He sought support for his own legislation that seeks to force asylum seekers to apply for American safe harbor at home, immediately deport unaccompanied minors and increase detention time for migrant children.

We’re a light unto the nations.