Remember When Holier-Than-Thou CNN Turned Deporting Illegals into a Game? We Do...
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump ran for office on a promise to secure the nation’s porous southern border, preferably with a border wall, but at the very least with strict enforcement of existing immigration laws. Liberals and the liberal media protested in earnest, even as they often overlooked the largely tepid enforcement of immigration laws under the Obama administration.
Along the lines of Trump’s campaign promise, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April that he would implement a “zero tolerance” policy for the criminal act of illegally crossing the border — first time offense is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry into the country is a felony — and any adults who illegally crossed the border would be detained and prosecuted.
Amid great protest from the liberals and their ideologically aligned media allies, Sessions admitted in May that his “zero tolerance” policy on the border would inevitably result in illegal immigrant families being temporarily split up while the parents were detained and prosecuted, with the children to be held under the supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services for the duration of their parent’s prosecution or adjudication of an asylum claim, according to CBS News.
“We don’t want to separate families, but we don’t want families to come to the border illegally and attempt to enter into this country improperly,” Sessions stated. “The parents are subject to prosecution while children may not be. So, if we do our duty and prosecute those cases, then children inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions.”
This incensed liberals and liberal media outlets like CNN even further, which have now taken to smearing anyone — sometimes with sickeningly ludicrous comparisons to Nazis — who supports enforcement of immigration laws at the border as being in favor of splitting up innocent families.
But this over-the-top outrage with regard to the enforcement of immigration laws under the Trump administration was decidedly lacking a few years ago and the occasional enforcement of immigration laws under the Obama administration, which similarly included separating children from their parents while a case was processed.
Indeed, though Obama received some criticism from the left for deporting illegal immigrants, it was such a non-issue for the liberal media that CNN even made it out to be something of a game.
For example, check out this tweet from CNN on June 29, 2014, in which the network made a game out of the potential deportation of a prominent illegal immigrant and activist named Jose-Antonio Vargas by asking Twitter followers to answer either “JOSESTAY” or “JOSEGO,” as if the public’s reaction should have any effect on enforcement of the law.
Do you think Jose should be deported? Answer with JOSESTAY or JOSEGO using #Documented pic.twitter.com/RGKrVlgoUB
— CNN (@CNN) June 30, 2014
Needless to say, the outspoken liberal immigration rights activist was not deported by the Obama administration.
Now, contrast the relatively lighthearted manner with which CNN treated the potential enforcement of immigration laws against Vargas in 2014 with the dire, end-of-the-world, I-can’t-believe-the-Nazi-Republicans-are-so-cruel manner in which the network addresses the enforcement of immigration laws in 2018.
To say there is a bit of a difference would be a colossal understatement, yet CNN and other outlets continue to set their hair on fire on a daily basis with regard to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics that are similar to those utilized by the Obama administration, though to a far lesser degree in terms of frequency during the Obama years.
Furthermore, if liberals really want to be outraged at whoever is truly responsible for the policy that allows illegal immigrant children to be separated from their illegal immigrant parents, they need to shift their gaze to the judges who sat upon the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1997.
According to Rich Lowry of National Review, that is who devised what became known as the Flores Consent Decree, which stipulated that illegal immigrant children could only be held for 20 days before they had to be released to the custody of a sponsor (typically a relative already living in the U.S.).
Considering it often takes far longer than a mere 20 days for an adult illegal immigrant to be prosecuted for illegal entry, and even longer for an asylum claim to be adjudicated, it is this court decision that has resulted in the policy of children being split from their parents after illegally crossing the border or seeking asylum outside of an established port of entry.
Of course, facts tend to get in the way of the left’s narrative that Trump is some sort of heartless, fascist dictator who is personally ripping children out of the arms of their mothers, so activists and liberal journalists will ignore the truth of the matter and continue with their fraudulently insane depiction of Trump as a child-hating monster.
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