Obama did not continue the practice.
For someone who is hanging his presidency on how far he can distance himself--and the country--from the first African American president's legacy, Trump sure is kicking this particular embarrassment into high gear.
It's gotten worse.
Acting Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner John Sanders told Rolling Stone:
"We are in a full-blown emergency, and I cannot say this stronger, the system is broken."
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan told reporters children were being detained longer than law permits because of a dearth of facilities' beds.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesman Mark Weber disagreed. He told reporters:
"Shelters have beds available and they are ready to receive UAC [unaccompanied alien children] when processed by DHS."
No matter how we try to explain it away, we are running concentration camps at our southern border.
Every month we are discovering more horrors to which we are subjecting people whose only crime is trying to gain asylum from violence responsible for tearing their countries and lives apart.
Last June, the Trump administration tested the limits of its anti-immigrant stance by admitting (after denying) and reaffirming its practice of divorcing refugee children from their parents crossing into the United States.
Then we learned of another atrocity.
According to legal affidavits filed April 23, 2018, in U.S. District Court in California, refugee children in U.S. custody were being injected with psychotropic drugs that inflict dizziness, lethargy, and sometimes incapacitation.
In September, the Trump administration transferred $9.8 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) disaster-relief budget to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for more migrant detention camps.
Then came news in November that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unleashed a tear-gas attack on unarmed men, women, and children asylum seekers.
In December, two migrant children died in CBP custody.
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