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Donald Trump called the 60 Minutes investigation into his administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy “fake news” and claimed that the Obama administration “had the exact same policy,” but the segment was very much real news while his claim that the previous president also instituted state-sanctioned kidnapping at the border was the actual “fake news.”
“60 Minutes did a phony story about child separation when they know we had the exact same policy as the Obama administration,” tweeted Mr. I’m Too Busy To Visit the Troops, falsely claiming that “Obama separated children from parents, as did Bush etc., because that is the policy and law. I tried to keep them together.”
“This is a lie,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which earlier this year sued over family separation, tweeted in response. “The Trump administration's systematic separation of children and parents at the border is unprecedented. No law required families to be torn apart, it was the administration's choice. We are still working to stem the damage of the crisis they created.”
There are still children in custody out of the thousands stolen from parents at the southern border, more than 120 days past a federal judge’s reunification deadline, and in state sanctioned kidnapping, 60 Minutes reported, that started far before former attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III officially announced the administration’s policy.
“There was a pilot program in the busy ‘El Paso sector’ from ‘July to November 2017,” the 60 Minutes investigation found. “We don't know how many children were taken in those five months.” Overall, “the White House says more than 2,600 children were detained,” the investigation continued, “but reports from various agencies show at least 5,000 children have been held since Mr. Trump's inauguration,” echoing a recent report from Amnesty International.
Former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Scott Shuchart also confirmed to 60 Minutes that officials tore families apart without any proper record keeping, which Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has recently sued over. “People were removed to other countries without there being good records of what adult went with what child,” Shuchart said.
It was already painfully evident the administration’s actions meant some kids might never see their deported parents again. “A variety of volunteers and nongovernment organizations working with the federal government have been trolling through remote parts of Central America to try to find the parents—11 of whom have not yet been located,” the New York Times reported just days ago.
This has left children to continue languishing in custody, at great risk to their mental and physical health. “I had concerns about the trauma that the children could experience, about the cumulative traumatic stress that could lead children to have delays in developmental milestones, difficulties with their memory or thinking later, difficulties forming relationships and regulating their emotions,” said Dr. Pam McPherson, an inspector for detention facilities.
This is all on Trump’s hands, and no matter how many angry tweets he sends out saying otherwise, he caused this humanitarian disaster condemned multiple times by the United Nations (UN). Donald Trump, tweeted MSNBC Jacob Soboroff, “is the only president to ever systematically separate migrant children from their parents as a stated deterrent policy. I saw those kids in cages with my own eyes—a direct result of a policy put in place by Trump and executed by Sec. Nielsen.”
