Fox & Friends moves to rewrite the history behind the Trump administration’s family separations policy
Published
Fox & Friends is rallying behind President Donald Trump’s false claim that President Barack Obama had a similar policy of child separation at the border and that Trump was the one to end it.
On April 9, Trump repeated his claim that “President Obama had child separation,” saying, “I’m the one that stopped it.” This comment has been thoroughly debunked, “yet Trump keeps repeating it when he’s pressed on family separations,” The Washington Post reported. In reality, the paper wrote, “the Obama administration rejected a plan for family separations”; both the Obama and Bush administrations had a policy of separating children from adults only in limited circumstances, such as when the child was suspected of being in danger.
In 2017, the Trump administration began a pilot program of family separations, and in April 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions revealed a “zero tolerance” policy and the Department of Homeland Security began sending all cases of illegal crossings to federal prosecutors, which “meant systematically separating all families caught crossing the border,” the Post wrote. This practice has led to thousands of children being separated from their families and traumatized; according to a report by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, “thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017 [in El Paso], … and HHS has faced challenges in identifying separated children.”
On April 10, Fox & Friends moved to rewrite the history surrounding Trump’s family separations policy, even though Fox News’ own Shepard Smith had debunked Trump’s claim the day before -- underscoring the negligible role Fox’s “news side” plays in the overall operation.
From the April 10 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends: