Seriously.
This was a contentious topic at Thursday's presidential debate.
Former Vice President, Trump's Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, exclaimed:
"Parents were rippedtheir kids were ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 of sets of those parents and those kids are alone," Biden said. "[With] nowhere to go. Nowhere to go."
Trying to ascribe the practice to him and Barack Obama, Trump fired back, "Who made the cages?" before adding, "They [detained migrant children] are so well taken care of."
Trump, his sycophants, and compliant Republicans consistently blame the odious policy on Obama and Biden.
Hours before signing the order to rescind the family separation policy two years ago, Trump defended it, claiming the Obama and Bush administrations also practiced it:
"This has been going on for 50 yearslonger. This has been going on under President Obama, under President Bush, this has been going on for many many years. We are gonna see if we can solve it. This is not something that happened just now."
While technically true, this is misleading.
According to Vox:
"It's not that no family was ever separated at the border under the Obama administration. But former Obama administration officials specify that families were separated only in particular circumstancesfor instance, if a father was carrying drugsthat went above and beyond a typical case of illegal entry"We don't know how often that happened, but we know it was not a widespread or standard practice"Both presidents prosecuted many border crossers. But Trump's 'zero tolerance' policy created family separation."
Migration Policy Institute policy analyst, Sarah Pierce, commented:
"Bush and Obama did not have policies that resulted in the mass separation of parents and children like we're seeing under the current administration."
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is unable to point to statistics regarding the number of children the Obama administration supposedly separated from their parents.
The numbers of apprehended adults referred for prosecution under President Obama is 21%, which does not account for children who may have been separated from their parents.
Here's what defenders of the family separation policy are missing, though: asking "Who build the cages?" and insisting the policy was inherited from the previous administration, is implying the policy is wrong.
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