Can someone answer a question for me about migrant children?

[samplegirl]

Were they first separated under Obama administration?
Fact, checker was saying yes arguing with someone.

[elleng]

1. *The Trump administration separated 1,995 children from 1,940 adults from April 19 to May 31,

a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said Friday, a period in which the "zero tolerance" policy was in effect.

Jeh Johnson, who served as homeland security secretary under Obama, said he did not separate children and parents despite the enormous surges of unaccompanied minors and families that came across the border in 2014 fleeing Central American violence.

"In three years on my watch, we probably deported or returned or repatriated about a million people to enforce border security. One 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 last week. “I just couldn’t do it.”

Obama’s top domestic policy adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, said the Obama administration did consider a similar policy, but determined 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 five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea. The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are."'>

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/fact-check-did-obama-administration-separate-families-n884856

[soandso]

3. I just looked for more info and here's some

https://web.archive.org/web/20180705145634im_/
Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children were being processed and held at the CBP Nogales Placement Center on June 18, 2014

Favreau said in a series of tweets that he made a "mistake" by not checking the date of the photos before sharing them on Twitter. He explained that the photos were taken in 2014, when the Obama administration faced "an influx of unaccompanied minors who showed up at the border, fleeing violence from Central America."

He added that the pictures had been taken while the government was trying to "move those children out of those shelters as fast as humanly possible and connect them with their parents, most of whom were already in the United States."

https://web.archive.org/web/20180705072738/https://www.businessinsider.de/migrant-children-in-cages-2014-photos-explained-2018-5?r=US&IR=T

[samplegirl]

4. Thank you

I was trying to do it on my own.

[soandso]

2. Maybe

It's true they were separated during the Obama admin but it goes back further than that. Copying a previous post I made:

Separation was an unintended consequence of the Flores decision

Prior to Flores, people entering the country illegally were detained until their cases could be adjudicated. If they had kids, the families were held together. Activist groups, like the ACLU, sued the federal government, demanding that minors not be detained for something like more than 20 days and that while they were detained that it would be in child friendly facilities and not with unrelated adults. As result, when the adults who brought them were being held in federal prison facilities, minors were separated to meet Flores requirements. Flores dates back to the Clinton era and minors have been separated from adults since that time. Here's a brief rundown on it:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/21/politics/what-is-flores-settlement/index.html

Another consequence of Flores is that minors are often released to people they don't know and they're then lost track of.

That's the extent of what I know and I don't know what was implemented and where. It may have been completely ignored, in some places, for all I know. I say that because many years ago, I was shown a VHS tape of a documentary from, of all people, Alex Jones (unknown to me then). In that program, he was exposing some facility, in Texas, that he claimed was a Nazi style "concentration camp" for people who had entered the US illegally. IIRC, he claimed that children were there, along with adults (families). It was a big fenced facility, like a low security prison, and while he was shooting footage some guards tried to run him off. This had to be back in the 90s, when he was on local public television, in Austin, and it was not much of an issue on anyone's radar, as far I recall. There would have been far fewer people entering illegally back then and, I think, most would have been Mexican or central American. I know that the photos that came out of kids in cages was during the Obama admin. I think those places were for immediate arrivals and were short term until they were placed somewhere else.

I can't vouch for any of the above, including the CNN article, because I have no first hand knowledge about any of it but there's tons of links online about the Flores decision.

[samplegirl]

7. Thank you

This is so helpful!

[W_HAMILTON]

5. Hell no. And it's pretty easy to debunk because it was debunked back when Trump was first lying about it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/fact-check-did-obama-administration-separate-families-n884856

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/09/711446917/fact-check-trump-wrongly-states-obama-administration-had-child-separation-policy

https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-5409040005

[samplegirl]

6. Thank you so much

Last edited Mon Oct 28, 2024, 10:30 PM - Edit history (1)

This jackass we graduated with was going on and on!

D.U. Family always has the help and write answers!

Again thank you