On Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order purportedly attempting to reunify migrant children with illegal immigrant parents while in custody. This separation, supposedly, was the greatest moral crisis afflicting the country in a generation.
On Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order purportedly attempting to reunify migrant children with illegal immigrant parents while in custody. This separation, supposedly, was the greatest moral crisis afflicting the country in a generation. The Trump administration “zero tolerance” policy was compared with Nazism and Japanese internment; Trump was featured on the cover of Time magazine grinning down smugly at a crying small Central American child.
So when Trump signed the executive order, you’d imagine that Democrats would have celebrated – after all, kids would now be able to stay with their parents, so far as the law allowed!
Instead, Democrats immediately suggested that holding children together with parents was brutal and evil – the same argument civil rights groups made when President Obama pursued the same policy, an argument that ended in a Ninth Circuit ruling mandating the separation of children from parents.
Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) tweeted:
Senator Bernie Sanders (Loonbag-VT) explained that the executive order didn’t go far enough, because “we have a situation where the Trump administration now, their solution is to provide indefinite detention…the Trump administration wants to undo the Flores settlement, which focuses on the needs of children and limits to 20 days, the number of days that children can be in jail.” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) told CNN that Trump’s new policy – i.e. Obama’s old policy – “could lead to family internment camps.” The execrable Samantha Bee, who was officially named World’s Least Funny Human™ just a few weeks ago, mocked, “Yay! No more baby internment camps, just regular internment camps… Cool! That’s what we call a win in 2018. To be clear, I am happy that at least these kids are theoretically gonna stay with their parents, but Mommy & Me Jails are not a solution.”
So, in other words, they didn’t care all that much about separation, because when the separation is rectified, that too is awful. All those on the Left really want is the full release of all illegal immigrants with children. End of story.
How do we know that? Because they weren’t nearly as nonplussed by the Obama administration policy keeping children with parents in detention as they are by Trump’s same exact policy prescription. Here’s Rep. Luis Guttierez (D-IL) explaining: “We challenged Obama… You know, Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said I only can keep children in detention for 20 days. And here’s what the Obama administration began to do, 20 days detention for children, as they apply for their asylum request, right, and the children and the moms were released together.”
This is the agenda. Release everyone. That’s why Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was willing to allow the separation policy to continue rather than work with Republicans in Congress to fix it.
The separation policy is bad. It should be fixed. But that’s not the actual Democratic agenda. And a solid percentage of the histrionics from the media and the Democrats were crocodile tears.
