Did Obama Separate Families That Cross the Border

Amid growing outrage over the "zippo tolerance" immigration policy implemented by President Donald Trump's administration in April, the president and his allies have sought to downplay the practice of separating families who cross the border illegally as nothing 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 place. "This has been going on nether President Obama, under President Bush, this has been going on for many many years. Nosotros are gonna meet if we tin solve information technology. This is non something that happened only now."

This is inaccurate — at that place was no widespread Obama-era policy of separating parents and children — but it'due south a common talking betoken for Republican commentators and members of the president's administration. Trump's policy, now temporarily halted, aimed to prosecute every single 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 U.s..

"The Obama administration, the Bush-league administration all separated families," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters at the White House on Monday. "They absolutely did. They did — their rate was less than ours, but 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 Fox News.

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Bourgeois Union, made a similar signal on Play a joke on News on Fri.

"You know what's ironic?" he said. "It's the same mode Barack Obama did it."

Immigration advocates and former Obama administration officials say that's just non truthful.

The idea that this is simply a continuation of an Obama-era practice is "preposterous," said Denise Gilman, managing director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Constabulary School. "At that place were occasionally instances where y'all would notice a separated family — maybe like one every six months to a year — and that was usually because at that place had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn't really the parent."

One time custody concerns were resolved, "at that place was pretty immediately reunification," Gilman told NBC News. "There were non 2,000 kids in two months — it's not the same universe," she added.

The Trump assistants separated 1,995 children from 1,940 adults from April nineteen to May 31, a spokesman for the Section of Homeland Security said Friday, a menses in which the "zero tolerance" policy was in consequence.

Jeh Johnson, who served equally homeland security secretarial assistant 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 3 years on my watch, we probably deported or returned or repatriated about a one thousand thousand people to enforce border security. One of the things I could not do is separate a kid from his or her mother, or literally pull a mother from his or her arms," Johnson said on MSNBC terminal week. "I merely couldn't practice it."

Obama's meridian domestic policy adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, said the Obama administration did consider a like policy, just 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 similar, 'We're not going to practice this, are we?' We spent 5 minutes thinking information technology through and concluded that it was a bad idea. The morality of it was articulate — that's non who nosotros are."

The Obama administration did detain families together — some indefinitely — in hopes of deterring future migrants dorsum in 2014, earning protests and public outrage at the time.

"Family unit separation just adds injury to the insult of detention," said Bradley Jenkins, director of the Board of Immigration Appeals Pro Bono Project at CLINIC, the Catholic Legal Clearing Network Inc. He argued the detention of asylum-seekers is "unnecessary," and that Obama-era detention centers were apropos, also.

During the Obama administration, courts intervened in several cases in which families were detained together. The detention of migrants could not exist used as an effort to deter asylum-seekers, co-ordinate to i ruling. According to some other, the detention of minors with their parents ran afoul of the 1997 Flores settlement, a ruling that ready standards for the detention of minors by prioritizing them for release to the custody of their families and requiring those in federal custody to be placed in the least restrictive environment possible.

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On Tuesday, the Trump administration said they are looking for a legislative modify to that legal precedent on how the government treats children in clearing custody; on Wednesday, the president announced an executive social club to cease the policy of kid separation that he'd implemented in the Spring.

"In each and every 1 of our negotiations in the last 18 months, all the immigration bills, we asked for resolution on the Flores settlement that is what we view requires xx days before you have to release children and basically parents been released with children into social club," White House Legislative Diplomacy Director Marc Short told reporters.

The executive lodge Trump signed on Wednesday directs the Section of Defense to assistance 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, however, Trump said his family separation policy paled in comparison to his impression of the images he saw of the Obama-era family unit detention centers.

"Y'all look at the images from 2014, I was watching this morning and they were showing images from 2014 and they blow away what we're doing today," Trump said. "I saw images that were horrible."

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

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