Democrats attacked President Donald Trump over the weekend for a photo of migrant children being detained by immigration enforcement — even though the photo was actually taken in 2014, druing President Barack Obama’s term.
Left-wing celebrities, media personalities, and politicians took to Twitter to rage against Trump’s supposedly inhumane policy of separating illegal alien children from their parents, citing an article in the Arizona Republic and published in azcentral.com.
They rushed to delete their tweets once confronted with the fact that the photo was taken in 2014, when Obama was president.
Others blamed Trump for the policy of separating illegal alien children from adults — though it predates the Trump administration:
The Arizona Republic article claimed, incorrectly, that the 2014 photo was the “first glimpse” of children in a holding facility for illegal aliens — ignoring the fact that Breitbart Texas editor Brandon Darby had already broken the story of unaccompanied minors being detained at the border.
One reason for the policy of separating children from adults appears to have been to deter human trafficking. Immigration officials who were unable to ascertain whether children were actually related to the adults with whom they were caught often placed the children under supervision or in temporary foster care.
Trump administration officials have also spoken about the policy as a deterrent to illegal immigration.
Darby took to Twitter over the weekend to explain — and noted that the left had attacked his original reporting in 2014 about the crisis of children at the border:
The mainstream media, unable to pursue the left’s original line of attack — i.e. to paint the Trump administration as uniquely inhumane — seized on a tweet that the president posted Saturday, blaming Democrats for obstructing immigration reform that, he says, could theoretically end the policy:
ABC News reported Sunday evening that the president was attempting to “deflect blame”: “The president’s efforts to deflect blame also comes amid a #WhereAreTheChildren backlash on social media against the policy.”
Critics say there is no “law” that requires separating illegal alien children from their parents, but rather a policy that could be ended by the president.
There is also concern that the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has reportedly lost track of nearly 1,500 of the illegal alien children it has placed with families in the U.S.
However, it is unclear whether the children are “missing,” or whether they are in the care of relatives who have failed to report their whereabouts to the government.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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