The unpublished Justice Department inspector general report obtained by The New York Times last week revealed that the agency’s top leadership wanted to show no mercy families at the southern border, and urged the state-sanctioned kidnapping of all children there, no matter if they were still breastfeeding. It’s one of the most shocking revelations yet regarding the Trump administration’s family separation policy—but you really wouldn’t know it from watching the news.
Media watchdog Media Matters found that MSNBC was the only major English-language broadcast network to devote “substantial attention” to the story in the two days following The Times’ Oct. 6 report, with 33 minutes of reporting time. Only one other English-language network, CNN, reported on the story, but dedicated just nine minutes. “Fox News, ABC News, NBC News, and CBS had zero reporting on the story,” Media Matters said.
Like we’ve previously noted, the unpublished inspector general report also confirmed what we already knew: Former attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III lied to the American public when he claimed that the Trump administration “never really intended” to separate families. In fact, the inspector general described Sessions as a driving force behind the policy who reportedly demanded prosecutors "take away children.”
But Media Matters notes that not only was this horrific development largely ignored by cable and broadcast news, it was also absent from the recent presidential and vice presidential debates. “Additionally, neither President Donald Trump nor Pence has been asked about the administration’s immigration policies during the recent presidential and vice presidential debates,” the report said.
Not that either of those two men would have honestly addressed it, considering how often they steamrolled over the moderators or just flatly refused to directly answer questions. But Democratic nominees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would have answered if they’d just been asked about the policy or report. But they weren’t.
“In particular, the reporting sheds light on how Sessions and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein played a central role in separating families as part of an effort to deter migrants from crossing the southern border,” Media Matters continued. According to The Times report, Rosenstein, like Sessions, urged the cruel mass separation of families, “telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were.”
Subsequent reporting from NBC News found that federal prosecutors who “piloted” the policy at the border in 2017 apparently developed a “litmus test” to determine at what age it would be permissible to rip a child from their parent, as if that’s fine at a certain age. According to a memo from the inspector general’s unpublished report, agents were to see if the child could give their address, among other details. If the child could answer affirmatively, agents could presumably continue with separation. But that memo never made it to Washington, D.C.
Nor is English-language broadcast news fully accounting the Trump administration’s crimes and abuses against migrant children and their families to the American people. “Cable and broadcast coverage of the report is yet another recent example of the networks’ negligence in reporting on the cruelty of the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants,” Media Matters said.
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