Mainstream media fact checks: Obama separated families

President Trump speaks to reporters June 21, 2018, at a Cabinet meeting at the White House (Video screenshot)

Amid establishment-media comparisons of the Holocaust with the Trump administration's enforcement of immigration law resulting in the temporary separation of detained illegal-alien adults from children, a major newspaper chain is offering a fact check.

"President Barack Obama separated parents from their children at the border," concluded a story published Thursday by McClatchy.

"Obama prosecuted mothers for coming to the United States illegally. He fast tracked deportations. And yes, he housed unaccompanied children in tent cities," the story acknowledged.

McClatchy, which publishes 29 daily newspapers across the county, pointed out that "the prevailing belief is that Obama was the president who went easier on immigrants."

While noting that Obama didn't created Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy of prosecuting every illegal border crosser, the previous president "helped create the road map of enforcement that Trump has been following — and building on."

Trump said earlier this week the family separations have been "going on for many, many decades and many years."

"Whether it was President Bush, President Obama, President Clinton — same policies. They can't get them changed because both sides are always fighting. … This is maybe a great chance to have a change."

A DHS official told McClatchy it's frustrating to be blamed for conditions at facilities that predate Trump and for creating new policies that were already in action.

"We're enforcing the rule of the law," said the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly. "This is something that the previous administration didn’t do. ... The decades of ignoring this is what has led to today’s crisis."

President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday as a temporary fix to keep the families together while congressional Republicans work on emergency legislation. The bills targeting the issue, however, face opposition from Democrats who charge the GOP intends to insert "unacceptable additions."

A vote Thursday on the more conservative of two GOP-proposed bills failed on the House floor, while the vote on the more moderate bill was delayed until Friday. White House officials say the president his expressed support for both pieces of legislation.

The Daily Caller published a story Tuesday featuring photographs taken during a 2014 media tour of Obama-era detention facilities in Texas and Arizona. The article pointed out the Obama administration prosecuted half a million illegal immigrants from 2010 to 2016 and similarly separated families in the process, as did the Bush administration.

According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, nearly 200,000 children were referred by the DHS from 2012 to 2016. The children either were separated by their families or were unaccompanied minors.

At a cabinet meeting Thursday, Trump referenced the Daily Caller story.

"In 2014, in the Obama administration, they have pictures so bad they had a judge that said it was inhumane the way they were treating children," the president said.

"Take a look at some of the court rulings against the Obama administration. They talked about the inhumane treatment,” Trump said, adding "all over the place. Inhumane treatment. They were treating them terribly."

First lady Melania Trump made a surprise visit Thursday to a shelter housing illegal-alien children in McAllen, Texas.

Speaking at a roundtable briefing of medical staff, social workers and other experts, she said, "We all know they are here without their families. I want to thank you for your hard work, your compassion and your kindness."

Her spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, told CNN en route to Texas, "She wanted to see as close to what she had been seeing on TV. She wants to see a realistic view of what's happening."

Meanwhile, the Media Research Center blog Newsbusters found 22 instances over the weekend in which cable news commentators compared the separation of parents and children illegally entering the country to World War II-era war crimes and human rights violations.

The Holocaust was invoked 12 times across CNN and MSNBC between June 15 and the 18, Newsbusters said, generally in the form of comparisons between DHS detention centers and Nazi concentration camps.

There were also six mentions of Japanese-American internment camps and four comparisons to slavery.

On Friday, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough opened "Morning Joe" with a Holocaust reference.

"Children are being marched away to showers," he said, "just like the Nazis said they were taking people to the showers, and then they never came back. You’d think they would use another trick."