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Fact Check: Did Obama and Biden Also ‘Put The Kids in The Cages?’

Fact Check: Did Obama and Biden Also ‘Put The Kids in The Cages?’

cages
Fact Check: Did Obama And Biden Also ‘Put The Kids In The Cages?’ Photo: An immigrant child looks out from a U.S. Border Patrol bus leaving as protesters block the street outside the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center June 23, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

The most memorable catchphrase that came out of the second debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, came from Trump.

When questioned about the 545 children who remain in immigration detention centers because the U.S. cannot find the parents it separated them from, Trump shot back at Biden, “Who built the cages?”

The inference was that Biden helped erect the cages when he was vice president during the Obama administration.

“They built cages,” Trump said during the debate. “You know, they used to say I built the cages. And then they had a picture in a certain newspaper and it was a picture of these horrible cages and they said, ‘look at these cages, President Trump built them’. And then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him. They built cages.”

This time Trump, who is known for numerous lies, was telling the truth.

Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. government purchased an empty warehouse and converted it into a sprawling facility with a capacity for 1,500 detainees who had entered the country illegally. The new Central Processing Center or CPC opened in July 2014. It was clean, spacious and air-conditioned, The Washington Post reported.

While the facility was controversial at the time, it was sustainable and reportedly humane. With Trump’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration, the facility became overrun in spring 2018 and began to house children in large numbers. Obama, according to reports, did house children there as well but not in the same numbers.

The “cages” predate the Trump administration, according to Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama’s Homeland Security secretary, USA Today reported.

“You can’t just dump 7-year-old kids on the streets of McAllen or El Paso. And so, these facilities were erected,” Hohnson said in a 2019 interview with nonpartisan think tank The Aspen Institute. “They put those chain-link partitions up so you could segregate young women from young men, kids from adults, until they were either released or transferred to HHS. Was it ideal? Of course not.”

Trump’s zero-tolerance policy resulted in the separation of an estimated 4,000 children from their parents at the southern U.S. border, The Los Angeles Times reported.

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In 2019, an unprecedented 69,550 migrant children were held in U.S. custody, according to the Associated Press.

So what about the 545 parents separated from their children? Trump said the U.S. government is “working on it” and “trying very hard” to find the parents.

That doesn’t ring true. A federal court instructed the Trump administration to provide contact information for the parents but U.S. officials are not doing the searching, according to the LA Times. The court appointed a steering committee of non-government organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union and Justice In Motion because the U.S. government actually refused to conduct a search, the Times reported.