dudmuck
Diamond Member
Yes, there were kids in cages under Obama, and here are some contemporary news stories that demonstrate the kind of criticism he got for it:Seems she spewed the same, tired, debunked lie the Trump came up with cages for illegal kids. She failed to mention her husband started throwing kids in cages.
Michelle Obama's DNC address fact-checked by AP over 'distorted' immigration talking point
“Michelle Obama assailed President Donald Trump on Monday for ripping migrant children from their parents and throwing them into cages, picking up on a frequent and distorted point made widely by Democrats,” the AP reported.
“She’s right that Trump’s now-suspended policy at the U.S.-Mexico border separated thousands of children from their families in ways that had not been done before,” the AP fact check continued. “But what she did not say is that the very same ‘cages’ were built and used in her husband’s administration, for the same purpose of holding migrant kids temporarily.”
The former first lady said Americans “watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages.”
The AP noted that the “reference to cages is misleading and a matter that Democrats have persistently distorted” and Obama’s speech included the same misleading talking points.
“Trump used facilities that were built during the Obama-Biden administration to house children at the border. They are chain-link enclosures inside border facilities where migrants were temporarily housed, separated by sex and age,” AP fact-checkers wrote.
The AP then noted that photos famously circulated by Democrats “at the height of the controversy over Trump’s zero-tolerance policy at the border” were famously taken “in 2014 and depicted some of the thousands of unaccompanied children held by President Barack Obama.”
Michelle Obama's DNC address fact-checked by AP over 'distorted' immigration talking point
The Associated Press fact-checked Michelle Obama's Democratic National Convention speech after she condemned Trump for using "cages" to house migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border while failing to note that the same facilities were used during her husband's administration.www.foxnews.com
However.
Many overcrowded and/or overburdened detention facilities during the Obama administration were the result of the government being unprepared for a sudden and unexpected influx of people crossing the border, and they created alternative-to-detention programs to try and get people out of those facilities as quickly as possible.
Trump, on the other hand, ended AtD programs—despite the fact that they were cheaper than detention and 98% successful— and voluntarily overburdened an already-strained system by instituting his draconian “zero-tolerance” policy in an explicit attempt to provide a deterrent effect—in essence, to terrorize potential migrants (and their families) by creating a nightmarish scenario for them upon arrival.
And, before anyone wants to jump in with “but those AtD programs used too small a sample pool!”:
Those articles used a few AtD programs as an example. This Cato Institute article analyzes many such programs and demonstrates how they’re all cheaper and basically as effective.
