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06-23-2018, 10:30 AM

#141

Flytolive

Gets Weekends Off

Joined APC: Nov 2010

Posts: 1,785

Quote:

Originally Posted by C130driver

child separations (which we have established have been occurring well before Trump

WHAT WAS SAID
“The Obama administration, the Bush administration all separated families at the — They absolutely did.”
— The secretary of homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen, in a news conference on Monday

This is misleading.

While previous administrations did break up families, it was rare, according to former officials and immigration experts. The Trump administration, by contrast, has knowingly enacted the practice that some officials have characterized as a deterrence against illegal entry.

In 2005, President George W. Bush introduced Operation Streamline, which, like the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, referred for prosecution immigrants illegally crossing the border. Unlike the Trump administration, the Bush administration made an exception for parents with children.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security could not provide data on how many children were separated from their parents in previous administrations.

Jeh Johnson, Ms. Nielsen’s predecessor under President Barack Obama, said in a recent interview with NPR that it was possible that families were separated, “but not as a matter of policy or practice.”

“I can’t say that it never happened,” Mr. Johnson said. “There may have been some exigent situation, some emergency. There may have been some doubt about whether the adult accompanying the child was in fact the parent of the child.”

Cecilia Muñoz, Mr. Obama’s top domestic policy adviser, told The New York Times that the Obama administration had decided against separating children from their parents because “the morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”

A 2016 report from the American Immigration Council details the stories of children detained with one parent, but separated from the other. One woman was detained with her children and separated from her nephew, who was transferred to the care of a foster family.

But neither the Bush nor Obama administration had a policy that had the effect of widespread family separation, said Sarah Pierce of the Migration Policy Institute. “Nothing like what the Trump administration is doing has occurred before,” she said.