The article landed with a bang on the Washington Post website last night. "First migrant facility for children opens under Biden", the headline ran. Nevermind that the facility was, as even one of the two critics quoted said, a "Cadillac" environment for kids who were being cared for while immigration officials sought to find their parents or place them with responsible adult relatives. The article was immediately picked up by Twitter amplifiers on the left and the right: Biden = Trump, or so this seemed to imply. The overall tone was a tone of muted outrage vainly looking for something substantial to be outraged about.
And now comes the walk back:
No, Biden’s new border move isn’t like Trump’s ‘kids in cages’
Aaron Blake and Nick Miroff were assigned to clarify the original article. After recapitulating the key points, as well as the disingenuous tweets about it from both the far right and left, they gave the readers a history lesson:
Many children arrive at the border as unaccompanied minors, leading to difficult decisions about what to do with them. Many are seeking to be united with family members already in the United States. But some aren’t, and they can’t be released without an adult sponsor taking custody. Releasing them to the wrong person leads to all kinds of problems; in 2014, for instance, there was an uproar after traffickers took some teens who were released to go work on an egg farm.
These issues will surely test the president in the months and years to come. But suggesting that this is at all akin to what Trump did with children on the border — or that the media is soft-pedaling what the Biden administration is doing — just doesn’t add up.
Sadly, there are a number of parties with an interest in deceiving their supporters about this issue. Hopefully this followup by Blake and Miroff will be an antidote to this deceit.