Illegal Immigration: Trump Critics Spread Lies About Lost Illegal Immigrant Children, Baby Prison Bus, Detention Cages

Illegal Immigration: Trump Critics Spread Lies About Lost Illegal Immigrant Children, Baby Prison Bus, Detention Cages

Lost Children? Detention Cages? Baby Prison Bus? Trump's Critics Will Believe Anything

• 5/29/2018

Trump Derangement Syndrome: Over the long weekend, President Trump's critics were in a sputtering rage over his supposedly losing 1,500 illegal immigrant children, sticking them in cages, and putting others on specially equipped prison buses. Turns out, it was all 100% bogus.

On Sunday, photos of children laying inside a chain-link fence cage starting flying around the internet. New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein forwarded it to his followers, saying that "all of these photos are disturbing, but the first two are especially awful."
CNN's Hadas Gold described the pictures as "First Photos of separated migrant children at holding facility."
Outrage quickly followed.
"This is happening right now," said former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau. "Speechless. This is not who we are as a nation," said Antonio Villaraigosa, who is running for California governor. Actress Rosanna Arquette called it a "sick crime against Humanity"
Turns out the photos were taken in 2014 — when, ahem, President Obama was in the White House, a fact that nobody bothered to check before blowing a gasket. Once word of that fact got out, many of these same people deleted their tweets, rather than admit that the "sick crime" happened under their beloved Obama.

Next, there was a picture showing a bus outfitted with child safety seats being used at an ICE family detention center in Karnes County, Texas. ABC Houston reporter Antonio Arellano tweeted the picture on Sunday, describing it as "a prison bus just for babies."
Again, outrage ensued.
"Unconscionable and inhumane, "said Texas Sen. Sylvia Garcia. "This is what we've come to under Donald Trump," said Stephen King. Others tweeted: "your new gestapo at work," "this is what fascism looks like," "we live in a dark period of American history," "moral abomination." Etc., etc.
Oops. Turns out this picture, too, was taken when Obama was president. And, the bus was actually used to take the children on field trips to places like the San Antonio Zoo, a nearby park, the movies, as well as for medical treatment and court appointments.
So much for the Trump-era inhumane prison bus for babies.

'Lost' Children

Finally, there was the story flying around over the weekend about how the Trump administration had "lost" almost 1,500 illegal immigrant children who'd been "ripped" from their parents after crossing the border.
That sparked yet out another round of hair-pulling outrage.
"What is more shameful than forcibly separating, in America, parents from infant children at the border? And then, losing track of those children?" Preet Bhara, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, tweeted.
Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro said that "when I think about the 1500 lost children … I come back to the same thought: If we can't stop this in America we can't stop it anywhere."
Turns out the children hadn't been "forcibly" taken away from their parents, and they weren't lost, either.
As the New York Times explained on Monday, these children didn't come across the southwest border with their parents, they came across illegally on their own. As the Times explains, the children in question are part of the government's long-standing relocation program for "unaccompanied alien children," in which the children get released to sponsor families.

'Lost' By Obama

Back in 2008, the inspector general for the Health and Human Services department noted that HHS and Homeland Security weren't regularly checking in on these children to make sure they were doing OK with their sponsor families. So, HHS started following up with the sponsors 30 days after the children's release.
But, as the IG noted in a follow-up July 2017 report, HHS doesn't always succeed in its attempts to reach the sponsors. It reported that in the first half of 2016, HHS couldn't reach 16% of the 25,975 children placed with sponsors during those months.
In other words, under President Obama, the government "lost" 4,156 illegal immigrant children in just the first six months of 2016!
Anyone recall anyone complaining about the inhumanity of this when it was happening under Obama? Of course not.
Trump's critics are increasingly behaving like reckless, irresponsible, childish, hate-filled, divisive, uninformed scaremongers who will believe anything that makes Trump look bad. In other words, they are showing themselves to be everything they accuse Trump of being.