Ben Carson says conditions at the border are 'quite nice'

'A lot of the people who have been detained there have been put into sprung structures and tent cities that are actually quite nice'

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has praised tent cities housing migrants detained at the border, calling the conditions "quite nice" and saying he would like to build similar facilities for the nation's homeless population.

Speaking to Axios on HBO’s Jonathan Swan, Mr Carson described the tent cities as having air conditioning and heating, saying: “A lot of the people who have been detained there have been put into sprung structures and tent cities that are actually quite nice.”

“If we can do that for, you know, people who are being detained at the border,” he said, “why can’t we do it for our own people?”

Mr Swan asked whether such an equivalent to the tent cities on the border existed in the US for homeless people, to which Mr Carson responded: “No, they need to be built.”

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security requested the US military build six tent cities near the US-Mexico border to house an estimated 7,500 migrants detained in federal custody.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement oversees conditions for migrants detained at the US-Mexico border, as the Trump administration continues to build new shelters in the region for undocumented immigrants while implementing hard-line policies against illegal border crossings.

Customs and Border Protection explained the need for new shelters amid an influx of migrants last year, saying in a statement at the time: “The humanitarian and border security crisis on our south-west border has stretched our resources and processing facilities to the breaking point.”

John Sanders, a senior official at CBP, said the “temporary facilities will support our efforts to process, care for and transfer the unprecedented number of families and unaccompanied children crossing the border each day”.

Conditions for migrants at the nation’s southern border have received extensive criticism under the Trump administration, with reports alleging both physical and verbal abuse against immigrants detained in facilities throughout the region.

Migrants rights groups have slammed the construction of tent cities, including the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Texas which called the tents a “Band-Aid solution” last year.

“The federal government has waited too long and this is not a solution, but unfortunately it might be necessary to accommodate everyone that’s coming,” Dylan Corbett, executive director of the immigration advocacy group, told The Guardian. “We have to make sure this is not a place where human rights are violated, as we’ve seen that in these makeshift facilities.”