The Department of Homeland Security is clamping down on information regarding the thousands of illegal alien children being held  in detention facilities near the border. They are preventing congressmen from making unscheduled visits to the facilities and keeping reporters from covering the flood of illegals crossing the border.

The Blaze:

Department of Homeland Security officials are stonewalling lawmakers who try to make unannounced visits to immigrant detention facilities throughout the country and are closing off public roads along the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to keep journalists from reporting on the growing illegal immigration crisis, federal law enforcement officials told TheBlaze.

The officials said senior supervisors have made scheduling visits ahead of time mandatory at detention facilities, turned back officials from unannounced visits, and that Border Patrol agents have been forced to clean up facilities and transfer illegal aliens from unauthorized holding cells before they are inspected by lawmakers. Reporters have also been stopped by DHS officials from traveling along public access roads near the Rio Grande, where most of illegal immigrant children and groups are crossing into the U.S.

The media crackdown along the Rio Grande happened shortly after TheBlaze visited the region last month and traveled  along some of the more secluded roads along the river’s edge. TheBlaze witnessed dozens of illegal immigrants turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents after making the  crossing into the United States and interviewed many of them before they were taken away.

While in McAllen, Texas, TheBlaze made multiple requests to have access to the facilities where illegals are being held. Border Patrol spokesman Joe Gutierrez said all requests needed to be approved by senior DHS officials in Washington, D.C., and all were denied. A tour of a facility in Brownsville, Texas, was given to reporters who were forbidden from speaking to agents or immigrants. TheBlaze chose not to participate in the tour.

Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera said supervisors in his sector cleared more than 200 illegal immigrants being detained in the sally port, a garage used to load and unload illegal immigrants, last Wednesday when a group of bipartisan senior lawmakers made a planned visit to the McAllen Border Patrol station.

If conditions at these facilities were adequate, you'd think they'd let the congressmen tour them whenever they wanted. And why the gag order on agents and illegals? As for reporters covering the invasion, you have to wonder what DHS is thinking when they prevent the press from doing their jobs. All these things do is make people ask what are they trying to hide?

“They don’t want people to know what’s going on here, or for that matter anywhere, when it comes to the surge of illegal aliens and when [Congress] went to visit, the place was cleared out,” said Cabrera, who is the vice president of the National Border Patrol Council’s Local 3077. “The night before the group of lawmakers arrived the senior supervisors loaded up a couple hundred people being held in the sally port and shipped them out to Laredo. If everything is so fine and dandy, why not let the lawmakers in just the way it is?”

Things must be very bad for the government to control information this tightly. Or perhaps the Obama administration believes that by preventing inspections and interferring with reporters, the story will simply go away and allow them to get on with the task of dumping the illegal aliens all over the country.

No credible explanation has been given for why there is such a compelling need for secrecy. With the absence of evidence, we are justified in assuming the worst.