Trump Didn't Lose 1,500 Immigrant Kids, But Obama 'Lost' 4,159
As far as media double standards go, it’s a double helping of hypocrisy.
For the past week, the mainstream media has been filled with headlines claiming that the Trump administration has “lost” almost 1,500 illegal immigrant children who were detained while crossing the border into the United States — from a widely circulated USA Today column to the old #Resistance standby CNN.
But in the latest media misfire aimed at making President Donald Trump look bad, it’s the liberal hero Barack Obama who ends up looking even worse — and the truth is coming from surprising sources.
The basic — and completely wrong — liberal narrative is that a Trump get-tough policy that separates children from illegal immigrants who have been caught trying to enter the country has ended up with authorities losing track of 1,475.
But according to The New York Times — the house organ of the Democrat Party and chief propaganda outlet for the anti-Trump movement — the real story is much different.
First of all, the children in this particular subset of illegal immigrants weren’t even with their families when they were caught. They were traveling unaccompanied by their parents, so there was no separation.
Second, they haven’t even been “lost” in the sense the media is implying.
Instead, they have been placed in the custody of relatives inside the United States who have not responded to follow-up efforts by the Department of Health and Human Services — often because they are illegal immigrants themselves, who have little interest in contact with immigration officials.
In other words, there are not 1,475 children wandering around the U.S.-Mexico border like some kind of dysfunctional Peter Pan story. They’ve been placed with families in the interior of the United States.
More to the point, an even greater number of children — almost three times as many — were “lost” in the same way by the allegedly all-good and all-caring Obama administration, according to The Times.
“Losing track of children who arrive at the border alone is not a new phenomenon,” The Times reported. “A 2016 inspector general report showed that the federal government was able to reach only 84 percent of children it had placed, leaving 4,159 unaccounted for.”
Does anyone remember CNN, USA TODAY or other mainstream media outlets attacking the Obama administration for deplorable treatment of illegal aliens?
The answer to that would be “no,” because the media and the Democrat Party didn’t have a vested interest in skewing the truth.
Things are different in the Trump years. And Trump’s new “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration — which includes criminal charges against every adult caught trying to enter the country illegally — is the latest front where liberals are attacking.
And if that means making up a lie that Trump’s policy has resulted in almost 1,500 kids being “lost,” that’s just part of the #Resistance strategy.
As reported by The Washington Post (another mainstream media enemy of the Trump administration):
“As mentioned before, the 1,475 children were not separated from their parents at the border. However, many who have expressed outrage online about family separations have been appending their tweets with the hashtags #WhereAreTheChildren or #MissingChildren, intentionally or unintentionally linking the two issues.
“Some who should have been better informed also conflated the two, implying that federal officials had lost 1,500 immigrant children who had been taken from their parents, when this was not the case.”
Preet Bahara, the former United States attorney for the Southern District of New York — a liberal hero who was fired by Trump in 2017 — was among those who, as The Post delicately put it, “should have known better.”
Well, there are a couple of things more shameful than that.
Lying to the American public, like Bahara is doing, is one of them. (For a layman to confuse immigration policies is one thing. For a former federal prosecutor to get a key element of an accusation wrong almost requires deliberate malice.)
For liberals in the media to denounce a sitting president for alleged inhumanity toward illegal immigrants for one problem, while ignoring a problem three times as big when his predecessor was in office is another.
The reality is, Trump and his administration haven’t “lost” 1,475 children in the way the media desperately wants Americans to believe.
The other reality is that Obama officials really did lose 4,159 children by the current standards of the media/Democrat industrial complex. And the currently outraged liberals never breathed a word about it.
Even in the Trump years, it’s a double standard that’s tough to beat.
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