Warren Attacks Trump Over Border DNA Tests, Didn't Know Obama Did Exact Same Thing
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is always game for attacking President Donald Trump, and a DNA test being used to reunite illegal immigrant children with their parents must have seemed like the perfect opportunity for just that.
Problem: It was actually going on under the Obama administration. Whoops.
Warren is no stranger to embarrassment, and the latest saga began when Trump took yet another swipe at the Massachusetts senator’s putative fakery of her Native American heritage at a recent rally.
“Pocahontas, they always want me to apologize for saying it. I want to apologize,” Trump told a Montana audience last week. “Pocahontas, I apologize to you. I apologize to you. To you I apologize. To the fake Pocahontas, I won’t apologize.
“Let’s say I’m debating Pocahontas, right? I promise you I’ll do this,” he added.
“I’m going to get one of those little kits, and in the middle of the debate when she proclaims that she is of Indian heritage because her mother said she has high cheekbones — that is her only evidence that her mother said she had high cheekbones — we will take that little kit and say — but we have to do it gently because we are in the #MeToo generation so we have to be very gentle — we will very gently take that kit and we will slowly toss it, hoping it doesn’t hit her and injure her arm even though it only weighs probably two ounces,” Trump said.
“And we will say, ‘I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity paid for by Trump if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.”
This brought a tweeted response from Warren.
Hey, @realDonaldTrump: While you obsess over my genes, your Admin is conducting DNA tests on little kids because you ripped them from their mamas & you are too incompetent to reunite them in time to meet a court order. Maybe you should focus on fixing the lives you're destroying.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 5, 2018
Pretty brutal response. Only one problem: DNA testing on minors brought across the border wasn’t actually an idea that started with the Trump administration. As Reuters and other outlets have reported, the Obama administration used DNA testing of illegal immigrants, too.
https://twitter.com/GOPPollAnalyst/status/1015639621127016448
https://twitter.com/GOPPollAnalyst/status/1015643006869868545
Not only that, but the reason that the DNA tests are being used is not because the Trump administration is “too incompetent” to reunite families. As Townhall.com’s Katie Pavlich pointed out, part of it may be that they’re not even families to begin with.
Actually, they’re conducting DNA tests because that’s the only way to tell if adults traveling with children are actually parents. Most of the time they are strangers paired to unaccompanied children by smugglers (a billion dollar industry). https://t.co/MYWMM6Bm0k https://t.co/SR8tzhyQqw
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) July 6, 2018
“You can never really verify who the parents really are,” former Border Patrol and Customs Special Agent Jason Piccolo told Pavlich for a June piece. “Especially in light of adult males showing up with kids.”
So, not only was DNA testing of illegal immigrant children not a Trump initiative to begin with, but there is a legitimate reason for it.
And we still know nothing about whether “Pocahontas” is actually Native American, but the odds are not in her favor.
You’re zero-for-three, Sen. Warren. With that record on accuracy and hypocrisy, good luck on that presidential run.
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