MSNBC host Rachel Maddow broke down in tears during a live broadcast on Tuesday night. She was covering the latest news regarding the shelters housing illegal immigrant children at the border when an update caught her by surprise.
Maddow read the update live regarding “tender age” shelters in Texas that were housing the youngest of the unaccompanied children.
“The AP has just broken some new news, this has just come out from the Associated Press … this is incredible.
Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children … to at lest three … put up the graphic of this? Thank you. Do we have it? No? Three ‘tender age’ shelters in south Texas. Lawyers and medical providers … I think I’m going to have to hand this off.”
Maddow passed the torch to fellow host Lawrence O’Donnell but followed up with a series of tweets explaining what had happened.
Ugh, I’m sorry.
If nothing else, it is my job to actually be able to speak while I’m on TV.
What I was trying to do — when I suddenly couldn’t say/do anything — was read this lede:
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— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) June 20, 2018
“Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas…
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— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) June 20, 2018
“Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the “tender age” shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis…
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— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) June 20, 2018
“Decades after the nation’s child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about the lasting trauma to children, the administration is standing up new institutions to hold Central American toddlers that the government separated from their parents…
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— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) June 20, 2018
“The thought that they are going to be putting such little kids in an institutional setting? I mean it is hard for me to even wrap my mind around it,” said Kay Bellor, vice president for programs at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, “Toddlers are being detained.”
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— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) June 20, 2018
All from this Associated Press story that broke while I was on the air tonight, but which I was unable to read on the air:https://t.co/2VBLTVxvQq
Again, I apologize for losing it there for a moment. Not the way I intended that to go, not by a mile.
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) June 20, 2018