Statement:
BIDEN: We did not separate–
TRUMP: –Who built the cages, Joe?
BIDEN: –Let’s talk about–
TRUMP: –Who built the cages, Joe?
BIDEN: Let’s talk about what happened. Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. Parents were ripped– their kids were ripped from their arms and separated.
Claim: Biden says “we did not separate” children from their families, and he says the Trump administration did.
Fact check: True
Claim: Trump accuses the Obama administration of building cages at the border
Fact check: Misleading
Details:
Family separation at the border
President Trump appeared to reprise his false accusation that the Obama administration had a family separation policy. It was the Trump administration that implemented a border-wide, systematic policy to split up migrant families, sending parents to adult ICE detention centers and their children to U.S. refugee agency shelters after they were incorrectly treated as unaccompanied minors.
Biden correctly noted that this policy was implemented to deter unauthorized U.S.-bound migration. This did not happen during Mr. Obama’s tenure. His administration rejected a plan for family separations at the border, according to former White House Domestic Policy Council Director Celia Munoz the Washington Post notes.
The Obama administration only separated migrant children from families under certain limited circumstances, such as when the child’s safety appeared at risk or when the parent had a serious criminal history, according to the Associated Press.
The Trump administration began a pilot program for family separations in the El Paso area beginning in mid-2017. In April 2018, the Justice Department, under President Trump, announced its “zero-tolerance policy” prohibiting “both attempted illegal entry and illegal entry into the United States by an alien.” The policy dictated that all migrants who cross the border without permission, including those seeking asylum, be referred to the Justice Department for prosecution. Children under the age of 18 who were accompanying them were separated from their families and placed into the custody of the Health and Human Services Department. Following massive public backlash, President Trump was forced to sign an executive order in June 2018 rescinding the policy.
“Cages” at the border
When pressed on his administration’s family separation policy at the southern border, President Trump said the Obama administration built the “cages,” presumably referring to temporary Border Patrol processing stations for migrant families and unaccompanied minors.
Photographs taken in 2014 surfaced on social media of facilities in McAllen, Texas, and Nogales, Arizona, of immigrants behind a chain-link fence in a warehouse converted to a detention facility during a spike in incidences of unaccompanied minors crossing the border. The McAllen facility had been converted to house immigrant children, according to local reports.
The Obama administration detained migrant families and unaccompanied minors in these temporary Border Patrol stations after apprehending them and before transferring families to ICE detention centers and the unaccompanied kids to the U.S. refugee agency. This has been the practice at the border during both Republican and Democratic administrations. The Obama administration did dramatically expand family immigration detention in 2014 and 2015 — when it faced a surge in border crossings — and was sued over the length of detention children endured.
In a June 2019 interview at the Aspen Institute, President Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson explained, “Very clearly, chain link, barriers, partitions, fences, cages, whatever you want to call them, were not invented on January 20, 2017.” But he said the detention was meant to be temporary, noting that under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, children could only be held in those facilities for 72 hours before being transferred to HHS. “But during that 72-hour period, when you have something that is a multiple, like four times, of what you’re accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you’ve got to find places quickly to put kids. You can’t just dump 7-year-old kids on the streets of McAllen or El Paso,” Johnson said.
The Obama administration detained migrant families and unaccompanied minors in these temporary Border Patrol stations after apprehending them and before transferring families to ICE detention centers and the unaccompanied kids to the U.S. refugee agency. This has been the practice at the border during both Republican and Democratic administrations. The Obama administration did dramatically expand family immigration detention in 2014 and 2015 — when it faced a surge in border crossings — and was sued over the length of detention children endured.
Camilo Montoya-Galvez and Sara Cook
