By Franco Ordonez & Anita Kumar
| McClatchy
Photo From The Obama Administration In 2014: Detainees sleep and watch television
in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children
are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales
Placement Center in Nogales, Ariz. The CPB provided media tours in Brownsville,
Texas, and Nogales, that have been central to processing unaccompanied
children. - Associated Press/June 18,
2014
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama
separated parents from their children at the border.
Obama prosecuted mothers for coming
to the United States illegally. He fast tracked deportations. And yes, he
housed unaccompanied children in tent cities.
For much of the country — and
President Donald Trump — the prevailing belief is that Obama was the president
who went easier on immigrants.
Neither Obama nor Democrats created
Trump's zero-tolerance policy, which calls for every illegal border crosser to
be prosecuted and leads to their children being detained in separate facilities
before being shipped to a shelter and eventually a sponsor family.
But Obama's policy helped create the
road map of enforcement that Trump has been following — and building on.
“It's been going on for many, many
decades and many years,” Trump said this week. “Whether it was President Bush,
President Obama, President Clinton — same policies. They can't get them changed
because both sides are always fighting. ...This is maybe a great chance to have
a change.”
…
Obama took several actions that led
to an outcry of fear and distrust, though his actions failed to get the
attention the Trump administration has.
The White House declined to comment
on specific actions of previous presidents. But a DHS official said it’s
frustrating to be blamed for conditions at facilities that predate Trump and
for creating new policies that were already in action.
“We’re enforcing the rule of the
law,” said the DHS official, who is not authorized to speak publicly. “This is
something that the previous administration didn’t do. ... The decades of
ignoring this is what has led to today’s crisis.”
No numbers on children separated
from their parents under Obama is available because the Obama administration
didn’t keep them, according to Trump DHS officials.
Leon Fresco, a deputy assistant
attorney general under Obama, who defended that administration's use of family
detention in court, acknowledged that some fathers were separated from
children.
Most fathers and children were
released together, often times with an ankle bracelet. Fresco said there were
cases where the administration held fathers who were carrying drugs or caught
with other contraband who had to be separated from their children.
“ICE could not devise a safe way
where men and children could be in detention together in one facility,” Fresco
said. “It was deemed too much of a security risk.”
One of the most controversial
measures that Obama took was to resurrect the almost-abandoned practice of
detaining mothers and children to deter future illegal immigration.
The government had one lightly used
100-bed facility in central Pennsylvania and added three larger facilities in
Texas and New Mexico holding thousands.
The New Mexico facility would later
close and Obama would face legal challenges that stopped him from detaining
mothers and children indefinitely.
A federal judge in California ruled
that the Obama administration was violating a 20-year old case, known as Flores
when it kept families detained for longer than 20 days. The Trump
administration has used the Flores settlement as the backbone for the
separation practice and Wednesday's order will likely cause more court challenges
to Flores.
Chris Chmielenski, Numbers USA's
director of content and activism, said the Obama administration was put
"under incredible pressure" not to hold families.. Chmielenski argued
the administration didn’t fight hard enough. "It's part of the reason
we're in the position we are in," he said.
Obama took other controversial steps
as well, including fighting to block efforts to require unaccompanied children
to have legal representation and barring detained mothers with their children
from being released on bond.
The administration also deported a
teenage mother and her son back to Honduras soon after she attempted suicide at
Texas family detention center.
