Obama officials rushed to explain photos from 2014 that went viral showing locked-up immigrant children — and Trump’s facilities look the same
http://www.businessinsider.com/migrant-children-in-cages-2014-photos-explained-2018-5
- Several 2014 photos of detained immigrant children in cages went viral in May, and former Obama administration officials rushed to offer explanations.
- The former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau had even shared the images on Twitter, mistakenly believing they were taken during Donald Trump’s presidency.
- The former officials doubled down on their criticisms of Trump’s immigration policies, and said the 2014 photos showed unaccompanied children the government had been attempting to place with family members.
- On June 17, reporters toured a similar government holding facility in McAllen, Texas, where migrant families are separated from one another and held in cages.
Several former Obama administration officials took to social media and news outlets last month to explain a gallery of years-old photos that showed immigrant children sleeping in shoddy conditions at a government-run holding facility in Arizona.
The images, which the Associated Press first published in 2014, resurfaced recently for reasons that remain unclear, and quickly prompted viral outrage on Twitter. One particularly disturbing image showed two children sleeping on mattresses on the floor inside what appeared to be a cage.
A number of prominent liberals — and even a former Obama administration official — shared the photos, mistakenly believing they depicted the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrant children who were forcibly separated from their parents.
Jon Favreau, who worked as a speechwriter for former President Barack Obama, tweeted, “This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.”
Favreau said he later deleted the tweet after social media users pointed out that the photos were taken during the Obama administration. But by that point, critics had already rushed to accuse him of concealing Obama’s own harsh immigration tactics while condemning Trump’s.
Favreau said in a series of tweets that he made a “mistake” by not checking the date of the photos before sharing them on Twitter. He explained that the photos were taken in 2014, when the Obama administration faced “an influx of unaccompanied minors who showed up at the border, fleeing violence from Central America.”
He added that the pictures had been taken while the government was trying to “move those children out of those shelters as fast as humanly possible and connect them with their parents, most of whom were already in the United States.”
Another former Obama official, Cecilia Muñoz, who served as the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, offered a similar explanation to NPR.
“In 2014, we saw an enormous spike compared to what usually happens every year, in the number of kids crossing alone into the United States,” she said. “And we didn’t have enough shelter facilities, because we had a huge increase, so kids ended up piling up in Border Patrol lock-ups, which are no places for children.”
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