Rep. Al Green (D-TX) used a photograph of a migrant girl crying at the U.S.-Mexico border in his argument for President Donald Trump’s impeachment during the House of Representatives debate on Wednesday afternoon.
Green, speaking next to a poster of the photograph under a red-lettered slogan, “Impeach Now,” said that he was speaking “in the name of democracy” and “for the sake of the many who are suffering.”
However, that particular child was not suffering because she was separated from her parents, as Democrats have widely, and incorrectly, claimed.
As Breitbart News reported in July 2018 (original links):
The father of the tearful two-year-old Honduran migrant girl who became the face of the “family separation” news coverage says that his young daughter was never actually separated from her mother when caught by U.S. Border Patrol.
Instead, he says, his daughter and her mother are together in U.S. custody at “at a family residential center in Texas.”
Moreover, the mother had been deported from the U.S. in 2013, according to a statement given by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Buzzfeed on Thursday evening.
Denis Javier Varela Hernandez, 32, told the UK Daily Mail that his wife Sandra, 32, had taken their daughter, Yanela Denise, on a dangerous journey to the U.S. on June 3 without telling him. They had since been in touch, he said, and he learned the two had been detained together but never separated.
Yanela Denise became an iconic symbol of opposition to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, under which adults who cross the border illegally are prosecuted. As a result, children traveling with migrant adults are often taken to shelters separately until they can be reunited with their parents, a family member, or a sponsor.
Getty Images photographer John Moore took the famous photograph of Yanela Denise standing on the ground and looking up in tears while a McAllen, Texas, Border Patrol agent searched her mother next to a patrol vehicle.
The image spread like a California grassfire. Time Magazine used a cutout of the little girl on its recent cover, where she was depicted confronting President Donald Trump.
Multiple news outlets used the photograph as a symbol of the pain of families being separated by U.S. government officials. A Facebook fundraiser that used the photograph to solicit funds to help reunite families has already raised nearly $20 million, becoming the single largest crowdfunding campaign in the history of the social media platform.
Rep. Green has long been an enthusiastic proponent of impeaching President Trump, infamously telling MSNBC in May: “I’m concerned if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.