White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had another rough go of it with Fox News reporter Peter Doocy. On Tuesday, Doocy tried to pin her down on the Biden administration’s continuation of the juvenile immigrant detention program formerly named as “kids in cages.”
Peter Doocy just asked why Biden is opening up new "cages" for children at the border when he and Kamala referred to it as "human rights abuse" in 2019 when Trump was in office.@PressSec then repeatedly lied, blamed COVID-19, and claimed it is different when Biden does it. pic.twitter.com/IQuGRnwmi6
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) February 23, 2021
“This is not kids being kept in cages,” Psaki exploded. “This is kids, this is a facility that was opened, that’s going to follow the same standards as other HHS facilities, It is not a replication, certainly not, that’s never our intention of replicating the immigration policies of the past administration, but we are in a circumstance where we are not going to expel unaccompanied minors at the border, that would be inhumane. That is not what we are going to do here as an administration.”
Now, when Doocy circles back to the question at today’s press conference, you can see Psaki instantly wince upon hearing the same line-of-questioning.
This is the “circling back” we were promised, Ms. Psaki.
“You said it was not ‘kids in cages,'” Doocy led in. “We have seen some photos now of containers. Is there a better description? Is it ‘kids in containers’ instead of ‘kids in cages’? What is the White House’s description of this facility?”
“Well,” she responded. “Let me give a broader description of what is happening here. We have a number of unaccompanied minors, children who are coming into the country without their families.”
Why would they be doing that? Would it have anything to do with the Biden administration’s restoration of DACA’s anti-law enforcement guidelines?
“What we are not doing,” she continued. “Which the last administration did, was separate those kids, rip them from the arms of their parents at the border. We are not doing that. That is immoral. And that is not the approach of this administration.”
Donald Trump denied as president that he was in favor of child separation, while claiming that he put a stop to it.
“I’m the one that stopped it,” Trump said. “President Obama had child separation.”
Obama-era officials denied that the president they served under separated children from parents.
“The Obama administration did not do that, no. We did not separate children from their parents,” former Obama domestic policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz told NPR. “This is a new decision, a policy decision put in place by the attorney general,” which Muñoz said “puts us in league with the most brutal regimes in the world’s history.”
At a presidential debate in 2020, then-President Trump repeated the accusation of the Obama administration.
“They built cages,” he said. “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.”
The “kids in cages” narrative is a long-standing semantics game played by Trump’s opponents about whether separating children from adults in large detention facilities for their protection is the same thing as “child-parent separation.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, blasted the Biden administration.
Our immigration system is built on a carceral framework. It’s no accident that challenging how we approach both these issues are considered “controversial” stances.
They require reimagining our relationship to each other and challenging common assumptions we take for granted.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 23, 2021
“This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay – no matter the administration or party,” AOC tweeted on Tuesday. “Our immigration system is built on a carceral framework. It’s no accident that challenging how we approach both these issues are considered ‘controversial’ stances.”
It’s only 2 mos into this admin & our fraught, unjust immigration system will not transform in that time.
That’s why bold reimagination is so impt.
DHS shouldn’t exist, agencies should be reorganized, ICE gotta go, ban for-profit detention, create climate refugee status & more.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 23, 2021
“It’s only 2 mos into this admin & our fraught, unjust immigration system will not transform in that time,” she railed on. “That’s why bold reimagination is so impt. DHS shouldn’t exist, agencies should be reorganized, ICE gotta go, ban for-profit detention, create climate refugee status & more.”
Multiple administrations have made the callous choice to lock up thousands of children seeking refuge in the United States of America.
As long as we see people seeking a better life as “aliens” instead of fellow human beings, our immigration system will continue to fail us. https://t.co/xE1lmgSnJj
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 24, 2021
“Multiple administrations have made the callous choice to lock up thousands of children seeking refuge in the United States of America,” Squad member Ilhan Omar added.
Multiple administrations have made the callous choice to lock up thousands of children seeking refuge in the United States of America.
As long as we see people seeking a better life as “aliens” instead of fellow human beings, our immigration system will continue to fail us. https://t.co/xE1lmgSnJj
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 24, 2021
The Squad’s “solution” to having no “kids in cages” is to have no borders and therefore, no immigration laws. If they can point out a single nation on the planet that has survived such a disastrous policy, they can feel free to “circle back” to the American people on that as well.
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Jen Psaki Has a Hilarious Reaction to Conservatives’ ‘Circle Back’ Mockery
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OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion.