How Many Families Did the Obama Administration Separate
Amid growing outrage over the "naught tolerance" immigration policy implemented past President Donald Trump's administration in April, the president and his allies take sought to downplay the practice of separating families who cantankerous the edge illegally as zilch new.
"This has been going on for 50 years — longer," Trump said on Wednesday, hours before signing an executive lodge to halt the policy he put in place. "This has been going on under President Obama, under President Bush-league, this has been going on for many many years. We are gonna meet if nosotros can solve it. This is non something that happened just now."
This is inaccurate — there was no widespread Obama-era policy of separating parents and children — simply it's a mutual talking point 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 United States.
"The Obama administration, the Bush-league assistants all separated families," Section of Homeland Security Secretarial assistant Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters at the White House on Mon. "They admittedly did. They did — their rate was less than ours, merely they absolutely did practise this. This is not new."
"This is a policy that is implemented nether the Obama Assistants," onetime Trump entrada manager Corey Lewandowski said on Fox News.
Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Bourgeois Matrimony, made a like indicate on Fox News on Friday.
"Y'all know what'due south ironic?" he said. "Information technology's the same way Barack Obama did it."
Immigration advocates and former Obama administration officials say that's but not truthful.
The idea that this is only a continuation of an Obama-era do is "preposterous," said Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Dispensary at the University of Texas Law School. "In that location were occasionally instances where you would detect a separated family unit — perhaps like one every six months to a year — and that was usually because there had been some actual individualized business concern that in that location was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn't actually the parent."
Once custody concerns were resolved, "at that place was pretty immediately reunification," Gilman told NBC News. "In that location were non 2,000 kids in 2 months — it'south non the aforementioned universe," she added.
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 Fri, a menstruum in which the "zippo tolerance" policy was in consequence.
Jeh Johnson, who served as homeland security secretary nether Obama, said he did not separate children and parents despite the enormous surges of unaccompanied minors and families that came beyond the edge in 2014 fleeing Primal American violence.
"In three years on my sentinel, we probably deported or returned or repatriated about a one thousand thousand people to enforce edge security. One of the things I could non practice is separate a kid from his or her female parent, or literally pull a mother from his or her arms," Johnson said on MSNBC last week. "I just couldn't practise it."
Obama'southward elevation domestic policy adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, said the Obama administration did consider a similar policy, but determined it heartless.
"The agencies were surfacing every possible thought," Muñoz told The New York Times in an interview recently. "I do think looking at each other like, 'Nosotros're not going to do this, are nosotros?' We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that information technology was a bad idea. The morality of it was clear — that's not 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 unit separation just adds injury to the insult of detention," said Bradley Jenkins, director of the Lath of Clearing Appeals Pro Bono Project at CLINIC, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. He argued the detention of asylum-seekers is "unnecessary," and that Obama-era detention centers were apropos, likewise.
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, co-ordinate to i 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 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 assistants said they are looking for a legislative change to that legal precedent on how the government treats children in immigration custody; on Wed, the president announced an executive society to stop the policy of child separation that he'd implemented in the Spring.
"In each and every i of our negotiations in the last 18 months, all the clearing bills, we asked for resolution on the Flores settlement that is what we view requires 20 days before you have to release children and basically parents been released with children into society," White House Legislative Diplomacy Managing director Marc Short told reporters.
The executive order Trump signed on Wednesday directs the Department of Defense to assistance in the housing of families, signaling that Trump now intends to detain families together much like the Obama assistants did.
Merely hours earlier signing that order, however, Trump said his family separation policy paled in comparing to his impression of the images he saw of the Obama-era family unit detention centers.
"You wait at the images from 2014, I was watching this morning and they were showing images from 2014 and they accident away what we'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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