Sure you were, buddy.
Trump’s separation of immigrant families wasn't Obama policy
Critics of the Trump administration’s separating of families illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico have charact
www.politifact.com
Immigration experts we spoke to said Obama-era policies did lead to some family separations, but only relatively rarely, and nowhere near the rate of the Trump administration. (A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said the Obama administration did not count the number of families separated at the border.)
"Obama generally refrained from prosecution in cases involving adults who crossed the border with their kids," said Peter Margulies, an immigration law and national security law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law. "In contrast, the current administration has chosen to prosecute adult border-crossers, even when they have kids. That's a choice — one fundamentally different from the choice made by both Obama and previous presidents of both parties."
Denise Gilman, a law professor who directs the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, said immigration attorneys "occasionally" saw separated families under the Obama administration.
"However, these families were usually reunited quite quickly once identified," she said, "even if that meant release of a parent from adult detention."
In Trump’s case, family separations are a feature, not a bug, of the administration’s border policies, said David Fitzgerald, who co-directs the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies.
"The family separations are not the small-scale collateral consequences of a border policy, but rather, a deliberate initiative," he added.
