Claim: MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff alleged Monday that former President Barack Obama’s administration failed to separate migrant children from adults who arrived together at the US-Mexico border.
verdict: False. Former President Donald Trump’s administration was not the only White House to separate migrant children at the southern border from the adults who arrived with them, but it certainly received the most attention.
During an interview with Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican National Convention (RNC), Soboroff asked, “Will a policy that intentionally separates 5,000 children from their parents continue?”
Trump Jr. responded by pointing to the Obama administration’s similar policy of separating migrant children and adults at the border.
“You know, they’re not doing that,” Soboroff said.
Soboroff’s claim that the Obama administration did not separate migrant children and adults at the border has been refuted by multiple fact checkers, including CNN and the Associated Press.
“Under past administrations, some people who crossed the border faced criminal charges and were separated from their families,” CNN fact-checked. stated“While separations did occur occasionally under the Obama administration, they were not routine and were much less frequent, according to immigration experts and former Obama administration officials.”
Similarly, when First Lady Michelle Obama suggested that President Trump’s policies were “separating children from their families and throwing them in cages,” Associated Press fact checkers corrected her claim, stating that the so-called “cages” were actually immigrant detention facilities built by the Obama administration.
“Trump used facilities built during the Obama-Biden administration to hold children at the border,” an Associated Press fact check reported. “They were chain-link enclosures inside border facilities where migrants were temporarily held, separated by gender and age.”
“The Obama administration separated migrant children from their families in certain limited circumstances, including when the children’s safety was believed to be at risk or if a parent had a serious criminal record,” the AP continued in its fact-check.
Court records also refute Soboroff’s claims.
A 2016 ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that even before 2001, adults were often separated from migrant children who arrived at the border with them.
“Detained families have had to separate parents and children and housed separately,” the opinion said, citing records from 2007.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter. here.
