The left’s outrage on the current child migrant crisis is not only insulting to the families they claim to care about, but it’s also exposing their bias.

Currently, they are running around yelling Trump is literally Hitler and he’s rounding up these kids in detention centers. For one thing, they’re not what the left claim. The children have everything available to them. Good food, toys, television, games. They are treated well.

But that’s not the point here. Sure, being separated from your parents is an awful thing. But is it Trump’s fault these parents decided to put their kids in this situation by illegally smuggling them over to the U.S.?

Of course not. At what point do we start holding people accountable for their actions?

The technicality that the left and hypocritical Hollywood liberals who have only just decided to care about anyone but themselves are pointing out is that Trump made it a policy to separate children from their parents.

Sure that true. But is Trump the first president to ever do this? Of course not.

So if the left and Hollywood liberals can just pull their head out from their behind for one moment, let’s take a look at what the previous administration did. That’s Obama for all with selective amnesia.

It is right that Obama never established a policy that specifically mandated that kids be separated from parents at the US-Mexico border. This a new, Trump-era innovation.

But Obama’s defenders overstate the degree to which this is a departure from norms. Here is a brief list of things the Obama administration did do:

Arrested tens of thousands of undocumented parents whose kids were US citizens, causing them to lose contact with their children.

“Disappeared” those parents in the immigration enforcement system, where they were nigh-on impossible to track down, before deporting them to countries they hadn’t lived in for as long as decades.

Orphaned thousands of kids who were left without a legal guardian when their parents were shunted to another country.

Sent the parents of those kids to places where there was more than a good chance they’d be kidnapped, tortured, sexually assaulted, killed, or sometimes all of the above.

Traumatized both the kids left behind and the kids whose parents were undocumented but not yet arrested, which saw those kids develop symptoms of PTSD, stress-based health problems, and night terrors.









To put it simply, While Obama may not have specifically called for migrants to have their kids taken away when crossing the border, but separating parents away from their kids — in so many cases, permanently — was for many years a consistent and well-known outcome of his policies.

Let’s not forget the Alien Transfer and Exit Program (ATEP) from 2008, which saw an increase in use under Barack Obama.

ATEP was a less extreme precursor to President Trump’s current policy, with the same goal in mind: to make crossing the border such an awful, disorienting ordeal that migrants would never try it again.

Migrants traveling together would be separated, then shipped off hundreds of miles away to a mystery location, often with no I.D., money, belongings, no way to contact their loved ones or the people they had been traveling with, nor any idea what they would do once they were there. Often, they were sent to places less safe than those they traveled from, making them easy targets for local criminals.

Hundreds of families were separated, typically husbands and wives. Disappearing someone’s husband may not be quite as awful as stealing someone’s children, but you have to wonder when it was decided that one policy was “evil” while the other was acceptable. This was particularly perilous for women, who, after being separated from their traveling companions, were subsequently at much higher risk of sexual assault.

And by the way, even though the use of ATEP was officially limited to men aged between twenty and sixty with no medical conditions, that didn’t mean kids couldn’t be separated from their parents. No More Deaths, an Arizona-based advocacy group, found that of the 869 incidents of family separation they documented between 2008 and 2011, 58 involved minors being separated. The group documented one incident where two minors traveling with four adult family members were separated, and another where a woman’s 18-year-old asthmatic son disappeared in the system. In another case, a man traveling with his 7-year-old daughter and wife was deported to an unknown location and never heard from again.









It’s worth stepping out from within your Obama is great bubble and reading even just a sample of the accounts of the broken families left by the Barack Obama-era policies.

The kids put in three different foster homes after their mother was arrested for an alcohol-infused party one of them threw.

The son who found out the details of his deported mother’s violent murder after he Googled her name.

The undocumented couple barred from returning to their three small children in the US after crossing over to Mexico to see a dying relative.

The woman who became a single mother to her two kids when her husband was deported and simply vanished.

Perhaps Favreau (who tweeted out a 2014 picture of kids in cages while blaming Trump then defending it when he was informed it was under Obama), and other Obama defenders are content that, unlike Trump’s policies, such separation of families wasn’t happening at the US border. But if the breaking up of families and the separation of children from their parents is unconscionable, surely the left would think it’s unconscionable no matter where it happens to take place.

Or is it only Ok when they do it?









An original report of this article first featured in The Democratic Precedent

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