Add another lie to the liberal pile.

As Democrats aim to build a summer of discontent against the Trump administration in advance of the November midterms, manufactured outrage over the separation of families who enter the country illegally is getting its turn in the media spotlight.

But the role of the country’s most liberal court of appeals in the controversy is being ignored by the mainstream media.

The left’s latest effort to brand President Donald Trump and his officials as the worst leaders of the Western world since the Nazis amounts to blaming his new “zero-tolerance” policy regarding illegal immigration for the fact that children of illegal aliens are being separated from parents going through the judicial process.

But as National Review editor Rich Lowry pointed out in a column this week, the Trump policy is merely following the law as it is written by bringing misdemeanor criminal charges against all adults who are caught trying to enter the United States illegally.

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In a standard case, Lowry wrote, “(t)he criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.”

“If the adult then wants to go home … it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.”

It’s when adults try to stay in the country by claiming asylum because of dangers in their home country that the separation of children from parents turns into an issue, Lowry argued. And the reason for that is the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Simply put, a 2017 ruling by the 9th Circuit allows the federal government to hold children in custody for only 20 days if they are caught trying to cross the border with their families. (The ruling expanded a 1997 consent decree that originally applied only to minors caught crossing the border unaccompanied by an adult.)

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Since it’s almost impossible for an adult claim of asylum to be processed in 20 days, and since the 9th Circuit ruling made it illegal for the federal government to keep children of asylum-seekers in custody, separation of the families is largely inevitable.

It’s important to acknowledge here that even without the 9th District’s ruling, illegal immigrant families pose a problem. According to Lowry, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facilities have only 3,000 family spaces, which is not nearly enough. (Detention space for illegal alien adults is also limited, he said. “This means that — whatever the Trump administration would prefer to do — many adults are still swiftly released.”)

But the point is that the media’s portrayal of the current immigration crisis, like the bogus story of almost 1,500 illegal immigrant kids being “lost” by the Trump administration, is so flawed that it borders on fantasy.

The “zero-tolerance” policy by the Trump administration is being denounced as an act of unmitigated oppression by liberals, but it amounts to following immigration law as it is written rather than giving adults a free pass. (Illegally entering the United States is a misdemeanor. Repeated entries are felonies, Lowry wrote.)

The family separation liberals are now so agonized about was, in fact, mandated by the liberals’ favorite court in the federal judiciary. (The children must be freed, even if their parents are held in custody pending asylum.)

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Neither of those decisions can be laid at Trump’s feet, unless a chief executive of the United States can be faulted for simply carrying out the laws that Congress has written or judicial rulings have established.

And if that’s the case, we can toss the whole idea of a constitutional republic into the garbage and just put Barack Obama or some other wannabe dictator back into the White House.

The Democratic Party hates it. Liberals in the media hate it. But what Trump is doing is following the law — including a judicial decision by the most liberal court in the land.

And though the media is trying to blame Trump for splitting families at the border, their entire narrative is nothing more than a liberal lie.

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