The Media Are Lying About Trump Separating Illegal Immigrant Families. Here’s The Truth.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Over the weekend, the media went insane over the supposed Trump administration policy of separating illegal immigrant parents from their children. According to the media, Trump could with one quick fix simply prevent the separation of children from their parents; according to the media, all Trump has to do is wave his magic wand, and all will be well.
This is a lie.
More specifically, it’s several lies.
1. Trump Created Separation Of Children From Illegal Immigrant Parents. This is plainly false. In 1997, the federal government made an agreement in a case called Flores not to keep unaccompanied illegal immigrant children in custody beyond 20 days. The settlement said nothing about accompanied illegal immigrant children – children who crossed the border with their parents. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals then ruled that accompanied children also could not be held in custody under the terms of the settlement. This meant that the government either had to release whole families, or that the government had to separate parents from children.
2. Immigrants Seeking Asylum Are Being Punished For Seeking Asylum. This is plainly untrue as well. Immigrants who come to points of entry to seek asylum aren’t actually illegally in the country – they’re not arrested. They’re processed through ICE, and their children stay with them. If, however, illegal immigrants cross the border illegally, the Trump administration now treats them as criminals. If they choose deportation, they aren’t separated from their kids; if they choose to apply for asylum, they stay in the country longer than 20 days, and their kids have to be removed by operation of law.
3. The Trump Facilities Are Awful Thanks To Trump. They may be awful, but they were just as awful under President Obama. These are pictures from Brandon Darby of Breitbart circa 2014:
The big mistake made by the Trump administration here came courtesy of Stephen Miller and John Kelly, both of whom reportedly stated that the administration was separating kids from parents as a sort of deterrent. That’s idiotic. The deterrent is arrest and deportation, not separating children from parents. That’s why the House is attempting to pass some sort of fix here to keep kids with their parents.
But with that said, the media coverage of this issue has been patently irresponsible. Trump isn’t forcing children away from parents. He’s enforcing the law on the books. The legislature can fix that law at any time. The facilities he’s using are the same facilities Obama used. Pretending that this is Japanese internment (as Laura Bush suggested) or the Holocaust (as General Michael Hayden suggested) is ridiculous. This policy ought to be fixed. But lying about it isn’t designed to fix it. It’s designed to prevent a fix by allowing Democrats to play political football with children, believing they’re winning a victory by holding Trump’s feet to the fire with pictures of crying children.
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“Democrats are the problem,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!”
Trump again cited crime numbers in Germany, saying that the rates were up 10 percent since accepting a large influx of migrants into their populations.
“Others countries are even worse. Be smart America!” he wrote. “If you don’t have Borders, you don’t have a Country!” http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/06/19/donald-trump-democrats-want-more-illegal-immigrants-as-potential-voters/
What you have here is part of the problem, which began back in 2008 when George W Bush signed into law one of those "compassionate acts" that always seems to backfire:
A 2008 law requires the administration to offer extensive and time-consuming procedural protections to the young illegal immigrants. "In 2008, then-President George Bush signed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act ," Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Homeland Security , said at a hearing. "The law recognizes that special care is demanded when dealing with the young and vulnerable. Under these laws, the Border Patrol is required to take unaccompanied children who are not from Mexico into custody, screen them and transfer them to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement."
The law to which Thompson referred began as something called the " Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection Act of 2007 ." A pet project of Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein -- she had introduced the bill several years before that with no success -- the measure not only placed unaccompanied illegal immigrant children in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. It also set strict standards for the handling of those children. It required "whenever possible, family reunification or other appropriate placement for unaccompanied alien children"; authorized HHS officials to "engage the services of child welfare professionals to act as child advocates and make recommendations regarding custody, detention, release and removal, based upon the best interest of each child"; provided "pro bono legal representation for unaccompanied alien children in their immigration matters where possible"; required "that children who are detained be placed in the least restrictive setting possible in accordance with the best interest of the child"; and required "that the Office of Refugee Resettlement conduct a home study before placing a trafficked- or other special needs-child in a foster home to ensure the safety of the child."
The law made provisions for the relatively quick return of children who come to the U.S. illegally from Mexico or Canada . For everyone else, though, it created a long and arduous legal process -- one that is unlikely to result in the return of a child to his or her homeland.
In 2008 Feinstein attached the bill to what was known as the "William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008." The larger bill, with Feinstein's inside, passed both House and Senate unanimously, and was signed into law by a lame duck George W. Bush on Dec. 23, 2008."
Thus, an administration which is pledged to American security & sovereignty is left with few options
As Trump said, democrats are the problem.
Trump signed an executive order ending the old Obama policy he inherited.