Breitbart, the faithful servant of the Trump White House’s messaging line, is well aware of this. On Sunday, editor Joel B. Pollak wrote a post devoted to criticizing the AP’s word choice. “The AP’s choice of words is only the latest in what appears to be a series of politically-charged word choices by the wire service,” he said, and contrasted the AP dispatch with a story in the Los Angeles Times that described “chain-link fenced holding areas.” Of course, these descriptions are not mutually exclusive, and the Times’ description defines a cage. Yet Pollak insisted that the correct terminology is “chain-link partition.”

Before taking center stage on Sunday, this debate had been slowly building for weeks. Earlier this month, The Washington Post’s fact-checkers scolded Senator Jeff Merkley for saying children were kept in cages, only to earn a counter-rebuke from MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff, who tweeted, “I saw myself: there are kids, families and adults in cages, cells, kennels—whatever you call them. No question.”

The increasingly ontological cast of the debate continued Monday morning. Steve Doocy of Fox and Friends, the president’s favorite show, echoed Pollak’s line, saying that children weren’t being held in cages, but that authorities had “built walls out of chain-link fences.” Meanwhile, CBS News’s Gayle King was reporting from the border, where she described “cages.” The Border Patrol, CBS reported, took issue with that description, not because they felt it was inaccurate, but because they were “very uncomfortable” with the implication that the children were being treated like animals.

The obvious counter to this is that being held in a cage with 20 other children and few comforts besides foil blankets is also very uncomfortable. But this is abuse of the language, too. Refusal to call a cage a cage merely because it makes someone uneasy—or, perhaps more importantly, because it is politically toxic—does not transform a cage into a “chain-link partition.”

The point is that these children are incarcerated.

The cages aren’t wholly new. During the Obama administration, unaccompanied immigrant children who arrived at the border were kept in them as well, as this tour by Representative Jim McGovern shows. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said unaccompanied minors would be deported, labeling the practice a deterrent. There was outcry at the time, especially from immigration groups, and the Obama White House was forced to stop detaining families by a court. What is different now is that the children being held are being forcibly separated from their parents at the border. So is the scale of the issue—the Washington Examiner reports that there could be 30,000 such children in custody by August.

This linguistic debate might seem like a distraction—and, in fact, it is. “If you’re arguing whether the children are in cages or windowless rooms, you’ve lost the plot,” the comedian Ziwe Fumodoh tweeted Sunday. But losing the plot as a matter of fact and morality and losing the political point are not the same. When the debate is focused on what to call the pens in which children separated from their families are being held, rather than the fact that children separated from their families are being held, it’s a victory for the Trump administration and its allies.