Fact Checking claims that Obama policy was to seperate families at the border

It's ridiculous this has to even be fact-checked. Although it was easy to verify, to actually believe Obama could get away with separating thousands of kids without it being blasted all over the news is beyond ridiculous and utterly preposterous. Not to mention that there would be actual people who worked in the holding camps, etc. to confirm this.


There were a few that were separated when there was a human trafficking fear.

quote:

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Amid outcry over the "zero tolerance" immigration policy implemented by President Donald Trump's administration in April, conservative commentators and his head of Homeland Security have sought to downplay the practice of separating families who cross the border illegally as nothing new.

"The Obama administration, the Bush administration all separated families," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters at the White House on Monday. "They absolutely did. They did — their rate was less than ours, but they absolutely did do this. This is not new."

The idea that this is simply a continuation of an Obama-era practice is "preposterous," said Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School. "There were occasionally instances where you would find a separated family — maybe like one every six months to a year — and that was usually because there had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn’t actually the parent."

Once custody concerns were resolved, "there was pretty immediately reunification," Gilman told NBC News. "There were not 2,000 kids in two months — it’s not the same universe," she added.

Jeh Johnson, who served as homeland security secretary under Obama, said he did not separate children and parents despite the enormous surges of unaccompanied minors and families that came across the border in 2014 fleeing Central American violence.

"In three years on my watch, we probably deported or returned or repatriated about a million people to enforce border security. One of the things I could not do is separate a child from his or her mother, or literally pull a mother from his or her arms," Johnson said on MSNBC last week. “I just couldn’t do it.”

Obama’s top domestic policy adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, said the Obama administration did consider a similar policy, but determined it heartless.

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