WaPo Editorial Board: No, President Trump. Your family separation policy is not remotely humane.
Title on the Post home page: Lie No. 10,000 is really a whopper
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Source: Washington Post
No, President Trump. Your family separation policy is not remotely humane.
By Editorial Board April 29 at 7:19 PM
AS PRESIDENT TRUMP zoomed past a lowly personal milestone — his 10,000th false or misleading statement in his 27-month-old presidency, according to The Post Fact Checker — he let fly a series of whoppers on a subject that logic would suggest he’d be better off leaving unremarked: family separation. The president, whose own administration imposed and then rescinded a systematic policy of wrenching migrant children from their parents, with no protocol in place to reunite them, now poses as a paragon of compassion that ended cruel laws in place before he took office. This is false.
During an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Mr. Trump suggested that his heartless policy had continued practices in place under the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, among others. In contrast to his predecessors, Mr. Trump said, “we’ve been on a humane basis . . . we go out and stop the separations,” he said. “The problem is you have 10 times as many people coming up with their families. It’s like Disneyland now.”
In fact, the “zero tolerance” policy was formulated (with White House approval) by Mr. Trump’s then- attorney general, Jeff Sessions. The policy mandated automatic imprisonment for undocumented adult asylum seekers apprehended at the border, meaning migrant children would be seized from their parents’ custody and transferred for placements scattered around the country by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Several thousand parents and children were left with no means of contacting each other and no documents to facilitate their eventual reunification. It was an act of singular cruelty by an administration that has not shied from demonstrating malice toward migrants.
Neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Bush prosecuted policies remotely similar to Mr. Trump’s. While families were occasionally separated before Mr. Trump entered office, it was generally when there was reason to believe the parents posed a threat to their children. And when the Justice Department announced what it called a “new” policy that separated families a year ago, officials justified it as a response to a surge in undocumented Central American migrants crossing the border.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-president-trump-your-family-separation-policy-is-not-remotely-humane/2019/04/29/63d189ce-6aae-11e9-be3a-33217240a539_story.html
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