I noticed earlier today that NPR, the Washington Post, The Hill and even Fox News' Shepard Smith have all published fact-checking articles about Trump's claim that Obama separated families at the border but he ended the policy. They all claim Trump is lying.
I'm baffled that so many so-called journalists are regurgitating false information in an effort to slander the President. They're making a false claim that's easy to disprove and they're staking their reputations on this lie.
I remember the Obama-era vividly. I'm sure most of you do too. It wasn't that long ago. Back in 2013 journalist Brandon Darby published photos of children in detention facilities, sitting behind steel fencing, waiting for their guardians to be processed by Border Patrol agents and Immigration Customs Enforcement officials.
I also remember walking around a low-income neighborhood in Houston shortly after that news story broke with a microphone and a recording device so I could ask migrants (many of them here illegally) how they felt about the process of separating young kids from their parents. Story after story, migrant after migrant, I remember hearing over and over again how Obama wasn't nice to Central American asylum seekers. He detained them, he deported them and, in between those two actions, he separated them from their children while they were being processed. I still have the recordings. The migrants didn't like what Obama did or how he handled immigration. For many Americans there's this prevailing theory that Obama was easy on immigrants. That's not an opinion that immigrants share with white liberals from the suburbs.
And by the way, this rigid process of separating children from their supposed parents was for the kid's own good. When an adult comes marching over the border with a young child in a hand we have no idea if that child legitimately belongs with them or if these adults are coyotes, human traffickers or old fashion kidnappers. You don't know either. Nobody does. That's why we had the processing procedure.
After Trump took office he briefly continued the practice for about a year and a half. He instructed his immigration agents to follow the previous administration's procedures to the T, with little room for discretion or leniency. That's when the liberal journalists took notice. After spending the 8 years in between 2008 and 2016 focusing on anything other than the migrant crisis at our border, suddenly they couldn't ignore it. After all, now we have a president who literally campaigned on the promise of fixing that crisis and they were posed to present evidence that anything negative happening at our border was probably his fault.
Suddenly liberal journalists from news outlets like CBS, CNN and NBC reposted Brandon Darby's photos from 2013 as if the pictures were brand new. They weren't. Those photos were circulating on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook during the Obama era, but the left leaning establishment journalists didn't care. They presented false evidence to make a misleading claim and many news media consumers swallowed the tripe whole.
With national media attention now focused on the detained migrants and their children at the border, the outrage industry went on full alert. Protests across the country, riots in the streets, an illegal occupation of Antifa activists at an ICE facility in Portland and no shortage of angry keyboard warriors on Twitter proclaiming their furious diatribes at the orange skinned man in the Oval Office; they cried and complained and screamed at the sky until the President finally ended the child detention practice in June, 2018,
Now Trump is threatening to ramp up more security at the border and, in doing so, he's promised not to separate children from their families. He said that was an unpopular Obama-era practice and he's not going to continue it. You're welcome to hate the man, but you can't say he's lying because he's not.That’s exactly what happened. But a quick glance at news website across the country today reveals article after article trying to "Fact check" Trump on his claim that Obama created the child-separation policy and he ended it. They've all done a fantastic job of exercising mental gymnastics in an effort to distort reality and twist facts. They're all lying and they're all wrong. The media is being deceptive and misleading the public because they hope you won't notice.
But they're wrong. They're very very wrong. They lied and we noticed. Remember this.
Photo courtesy of Breitbart's Brandon Darby.