Twitchy called this the greatest “self-own” in Twitter history and I agree. Yesterday, a group of outraged progressives began tweeting around a photo of two children at a border patrol holding facility sleeping behind a chain link fence. Former Obama speechwriter and current podcast resistance leader Jon Favreau wrote in a since-deleted tweet, “Look at these pictures. This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.”

Lots of other progressives shared the same image/link including Women’s March co-founder Linda Sarsour:

And the man who recently spread the false rape accusation about a Texas Trooper, Shaun King:

I saw this photo floating around and didn’t know if it was real. It is. Children of immigrants are being held in cages, like dogs, at ICE detention centers, sleeping on the floor. It’s an abomination. FULL STORY: https://t.co/V4zRJ43Lvn pic.twitter.com/tbUWSb4B05 — Shaun King (@ShaunKing) May 27, 2018

Well, the picture and the story are real, but unfortunately for these outraged progressives they are both from 2014, i.e. this happened under the Obama administration. But word didn’t get around to actress Rosanna Arquette or Mia Farrow:

How can we as human beings allow this. ? This cannot continue or we are not human. this is evil …sick crime against Humanity ..we are responsible .. we must stop this now https://t.co/L9TbA0qp37 https://t.co/L9TbA0qp37 — Rosanna Arquette (@RoArquette) May 27, 2018

Children of immigrants are being held in cages like animals at @ICEgov detention centers. Tell ICE and your elected officials that this is horrifyingly unacceptable. In addition to tearing children from their mothers arms- ICE has LOST 1500 kids. #WhereAreTheChildren pic.twitter.com/dMWRIgpRuQ — Mia Farrow (@MiaFarrow) May 27, 2018

Antonio Villaraigosa apparently did get word about the date because he, like Jon Favreau, deleted his tweet:

Hello @antonio4ca Why did you delete this tweet? Is it because this was 2014 and you are no longer outraged because who this all happened under? Are you no longer speechless? Help explain, thanks. pic.twitter.com/Qe8Pr9Zac1 — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) May 28, 2018

I’m picking on some of the leading progressives who sent this around yesterday but there are literally hundreds more who are still posting it today despite lots of people pointing out these photos are 4 years old.

There are a couple of questions worth asking here. One is: How is it that all of these people keyed on the same old article at the same time?

So weird how Linda Sarsour, an Obama Pod Bro, Shaun King, a NYT editor & a CNN reporter all tweeted the exact same AZ central article thinking it was 2018 & not 2014. How do those things happen? It’s a Scooby mystery that may never be solved — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) May 27, 2018

The other obvious question is why none of these same people were outraged about this four years ago. Could it be that they didn’t want to embarrass a Democratic president but are happy to pile on a Republican? That’s certainly how it looks.

Finally, there’s the underlying question of why we had kids sleeping in detention centers in the first place. The answer to that question takes us back to a massive surge of unaccompanied alien children which peaked in 2014 with tens of thousands of kids, mostly from Central America, reaching the border that year. The Obama administration denied its changes to immigration law and the creation of DACA in 2012 had anything to do with that, but the timeline suggests otherwise. The first uptick in immigration began a couple months after Obama’s announcement of “prosecutorial discretion” in deportations back in 2011. DACA was created in 2012 two years later the White House sent VP Joe Biden to Guatemala to give a speech pointing out that kids arriving at the border were not, in fact, eligible for DACA. A CNN story from the same time makes clear that smugglers pushing the idea that the kids were eligible was a big part of what was driving the surge of minors.

So the Obama administration was not only in charge when those detention center pictures were taken, it was at least partially responsible for the conditions that led to the surge of unaccompanied minors which made those detention centers necessary. It’s quite something for the left to suddenly express outrage over all of this now. But it’s pretty clear most of them are doing so only because they believe the blame will fall on President Trump. That really is an epic “self-own.”

Update: President Trump tweeted in reference to this sudden resurgence of an old story this morning: