Who Built the Cages? The Truth In Complete Context

 

David Xol of Guatemala hugs his son Byron as they were reunited at Los Angeles International Airport in January. The father and son were separated 18 months earlier under the Trump administration's "no tolerance" migration policy. Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP

US President Donald Trump said during the 3rd and final U.S. presidential debate on October 22 that the Barack Obama administration built the “cages” or border facilities at the US-Mexico border, which were used to house migrant children and separated them from their families.

Answering a debate question about how he would reunite the separated migrant families, Trump shifted the blame to his predecessor and said: “But let me just tell you, they (Obama administration) built cages..... It was him. They built the cages. They did it, we changed the policy.”

Who built the cages and separated children from their parents at the border?

Putting the Question To Rest

Trump is implying his administration changed the US immigration policy for the better, because Trump said that the previous administration – during which his opponent Joe Biden served as vice president – did “nothing except build the cages.” This needs context.

It is true that the Obama administration “built” the facilities referred to as “cages” by Trump.

These spaces were supposed to be temporary. The construction of the 72-hour holding facilities was prompted by a sudden influx of migrants. In 2014, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had decided to use the processing center on Nogales, Arizona, and the McAllen facility in Texas to house the illegal immigrants. The Department of Justice (DOJ) was working with the Mexican authorities to stop unaccompanied children from crossing into the United States.

Local NBC affiliate KVEQ reported on the conversion of a McAllen, Texas, warehouse into a holding facility for up to 1,000 migrant children in 2014.

"You can't just dump 7-year-old kids on the streets of McAllen or El Paso. And so, these facilities were erected ... they put those chain-link partitions up so you could segregate young women from young men, kids from adults, until they were either released or transferred to HHS. Was it ideal? Of course not," Johnson said.

Trump's insistence on Biden confessing that the Obama administration “built the cages” is an attempt to deflect his own responsibility for separating children from their parents. His actions must be examined in full context to discern the truth.

Trump has made similar claims in the past that he “inherited” the separation policy from Obama, and that he changed it to bring people together.

However, American media organizations Politifact and the Associated Press debunked this before and said that the Obama administration did not have a policy to separate families arriving illegally at the border, unlike Trump.

Trump’s "zero-tolerance" policy to prosecute all adults illegally entering the United States led to the separation of hundreds of migrant children from their families. Family separations as a matter of routine came about because of Trump’s “zero tolerance” enforcement policy, which he eventually suspended in June 2018 because of the uproar. Obama had no such policy.

It was the Trump administration that made it a policy to detain children, including babies and toddlers, without their parents, leaving other children to tend to them and sometimes losing track of their parents.

The thousands of children separated from their parents were separated entirely due to Trump policies.

The Trump administration vigorously defended this policy of separating illegal immigrant children from their parents even as the United Nations demanded a halt to the "serious" violation of children's rights. Donald Trump blamed it on opposition Democrats, as criticism mounted domestically and internationally.

The truth cannot be denied. Trump and his principal legal officers own the policy.

“We need to take away children,” Jeff Sessions, Attorney General at the time, told prosecutors.

Rod J. Rosenstein, then the Deputy Attorney General, went even further, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.

"The practice of separating families amounts to arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life, and is a serious violation of the rights of the child," said Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva.

A court document filed on October 20, 2020, by the US justice department and the American Civil Liberties Union showed that parents of 545 children separated from their families have not yet been located. When the Trump administration decided to separate families in July of 2017, there was no plan to keep track of the families or ever reunite them. Search teams had been making headway reuniting families, but their efforts stalled when the pandemic hit.