Family Centers and Holding Centers Were Exactlyh the Same in 2014 Under Obama
Amid growing outrage over the "null tolerance" immigration policy implemented by President Donald Trump'south administration in April, the president and his allies accept sought to downplay the practice of separating families who cantankerous the edge illegally as goose egg new.
"This has been going on for 50 years — longer," Trump said on Wednesday, hours before signing an executive order to halt the policy he put in identify. "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 simply now."
This is inaccurate — at that place was no widespread Obama-era policy of separating parents and children — but information technology'due south a common talking point for Republican commentators and members of the president's administration. Trump'due south policy, at present temporarily halted, aimed to prosecute every unmarried illegal border crossing, including asylum-seekers. The government separated children from their parents or legal guardians because the adults had been referred for prosecution for illegal entry into the United States.
"The Obama administration, the Bush administration all separated families," Department of Homeland Security Secretarial assistant Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters at the White House on Mon. "They absolutely did. They did — their rate was less than ours, just they absolutely did do this. This is not new."
"This is a policy that is implemented under the Obama Administration," former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said on Fob News.
Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, fabricated a similar point on Fox News on Friday.
"You know what'south ironic?" he said. "Information technology'due south the same mode Barack Obama did it."
Clearing advocates and former Obama assistants officials say that's just not true.
The idea that this is only a continuation of an Obama-era practise is "preposterous," said Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Dispensary at the University of Texas Law School. "There were occasionally instances where you would find a separated family unit — maybe similar one every half dozen months to a twelvemonth — and that was ordinarily because there had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn't actually the parent."
Once custody concerns were resolved, "there was pretty immediately reunification," Gilman told NBC News. "There were not 2,000 kids in 2 months — information technology'due south not the same universe," she added.
The Trump administration separated 1,995 children from 1,940 adults from April 19 to May 31, a spokesman for the Section of Homeland Security said Friday, a period in which the "zero tolerance" policy was in effect.
Jeh Johnson, who served as homeland security secretarial assistant nether Obama, said he did non split children and parents despite the enormous surges of unaccompanied minors and families that came across the border in 2014 fleeing Cardinal American violence.
"In three years on my watch, we probably deported or returned or repatriated virtually a million people to enforce border security. I of the things I could not do is separate a child from his or her mother, or literally pull a mother from his or her arms," Johnson said on MSNBC concluding calendar week. "I but couldn't practise it."
Obama's summit domestic policy adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, said the Obama administration did consider a like policy, but adamant it heartless.
"The agencies were surfacing every possible idea," Muñoz told The New York Times in an interview recently. "I do remember looking at each other like, 'We're not going to do this, are we?' We spent v minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea. The morality of it was clear — that's non who we are."
The Obama administration did detain families together — some indefinitely — in hopes of deterring future migrants back in 2014, earning protests and public outrage at the time.
"Family separation just adds injury to the insult of detention," said Bradley Jenkins, manager of the Lath of Immigration Appeals Pro Bono Project at Dispensary, the Catholic Legal Clearing Network Inc. He argued the detention of asylum-seekers is "unnecessary," and that Obama-era detention centers were apropos, as well.
During the Obama assistants, courts intervened in several cases in which families were detained together. The detention of migrants could not be used as an effort to deter asylum-seekers, according to ane ruling. According to another, the detention of minors with their parents ran afoul of the 1997 Flores settlement, a ruling that set standards for the detention of minors past prioritizing them for release to the custody of their families and requiring those in federal custody to be placed in the to the lowest degree restrictive environment possible.
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On Tuesday, the Trump administration said they are looking for a legislative change to that legal precedent on how the government treats children in immigration custody; on Midweek, the president announced an executive order to end the policy of child separation that he'd implemented in the Bound.
"In each and every one of our negotiations in the concluding 18 months, all the immigration bills, we asked for resolution on the Flores settlement that is what we view requires 20 days before you accept to release children and basically parents been released with children into social club," White House Legislative Diplomacy Director Marc Short told reporters.
The executive gild Trump signed on Midweek directs the Department of Defense force to help in the housing of families, signaling that Trump now intends to detain families together much like the Obama administration did.
Just hours before signing that order, yet, Trump said his family separation policy paled in comparison to his impression of the images he saw of the Obama-era family detention centers.
"You look at the images from 2014, I was watching this morning and they were showing images from 2014 and they blow abroad what nosotros're doing today," Trump said. "I saw images that were horrible."
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/fact-check-did-obama-administration-separate-families-n884856
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