Whenever the media screeches about President Donald Trump “putting kids in cages,” one can be sure the screecher is not fully familiar with the situation and does not actually care about the situation outside of politics.
When the news of family separations first “broke,” journalists were using a photo and an article showing children locked in chain-linked cages, like one would see at an animal shelter. The only problem, as many on the Right pointed out, is that the photo and article were from 2014, when Barack Obama was president, not Donald Trump.
The media has since shown outrage over the separations of families at the border due to the Trump administration’s previous “zero-tolerance” policy for crossing the border. But as Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro wrote last year, the media’s facts are wrong:
“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.”
But the media continues to handle the issue irresponsibly. On CNN Tuesday night, host Wolf Blitzer allowed a former Obama official (without designating her as such) to defend family separations under Obama as somehow benevolent, instead of Trump’s allegedly evil reasons. Sam Vinograd, a national security analyst for CNN who previously worked for Obama’s National Security Council claimed that when Obama separated children, he did so “for their protection.”
“When President Obama separated children from their families, Wolf, or from adults, Wolf, it was for their protection. It was if there was a risk of trafficking or other kind of harm that might have been incurred,” Vinograd said during a discussion of family separations. “But even if he did do that, why is Donald Trump saying that two wrongs make a right? Again, Obama wasn’t wrong, but so he’s saying that because something happened under President Obama, he’s repeating it and upping the ante. That’s an incredibly poor excuse. He’s systemized that inhumane treatment that, again, Obama was doing to protect the children.”
There is zero evidence that absolutely every separation under Obama was to get children away from traffickers and absolutely every separation under Trump was done for whatever racist intentions the media impugns onto Trump. In fact, a Senate report from January 2016, while Obama was still president, found that the Department of Health and Human Services had actually given more than a dozen immigrant children to human traffickers because it failed to adequately conduct background checks. The New York Times even reported on the situation.
And even if children were separated “for their protection,” why were they put in cages, as photos from the Obama years show?
Families were being separated under the Trump administration while adult family members – or the adult accompanying the child – was held in jail for illegally crossing the border. The Left’s argument against the separation essentially amounts to either not arresting people for breaking the law if they bring children along with them or putting kids in jail along with the adults who committed a crime.
There are many issues with the situation, but lies and distortions help no one.
Story cited here.
