By Ashe Schow
A new administration and a new party in power has had a significant effect on how the media covers family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Now that President Donald Trump is out of office, the media won’t even use the phrase “kids in cages” as they did during the Trump years, when the topic of migrant children at the border was treated as the greatest human rights issue of a generation (even though China is actually imprisoning people for slave labor).
Children who illegally cross the border with their parents but aren’t given immediate citizenship or a comfy hotel room – or kept with their parents in prison – have lost their victimhood status under President Joe Biden.
Now, instead of “kids in cages,” the media is referring to them as “migrant children” or “migrant families.”
The Washington Free Beacon’s Thaleigha Rampersad put together a supercut of the difference, showing the media’s repeated use of the phrase “kids in cages” when Trump was president versus the new, softer phrases, “migrant children” or “migrant families.”
As I reported earlier this week, the Biden administration is using euphemisms to distance itself from everything the media claimed to hate about the Trump administration and its treatment of illegal immigrants. For example, “cages” are now called “hard-sided structures.” Trump was also relentlessly attacked for his “tent cities.” Biden is reopening one of these facilities to hide the children of illegal immigrants, and it may require tents, but don’t worry, they’re not really “tents,” they’re now “semi-permanent (soft-sided)” structures.
Those euphemisms were in an official statement from the Department of Health and Human Services announcing it would reopen a “temporary Influx Care Facility.”
The issue on the border has been around for decades. It was the Obama administration that built the “cages” used by the media as a cudgel against Trump. It wasn’t until Trump was in office when people began sharing a 2014 article and photo (when Obama was still in office) to start talking about “kids in cages.”
Trump’s deterrent policy of arresting those who illegally crossed the border exacerbated the issue at the border. The administration wasn’t going to put kids in prison with their families (just as we wouldn’t put a kid in jail if their parent committed a crime here in the U.S.), but that resulted in family separations. Facilities to house illegal immigrants were already crowded under Obama, and the situations became worse under Trump. The media uncritically latched on to the result of Trump’s deterrent policy without asking numerous questions about the border, like getting Democrats to admit they just want an open border.
Democrats didn’t want the families separated, but they didn’t want the kids in jail with their parents, either. They didn’t want illegal immigrants arrested, period. But they refused to admit they wanted illegal immigrants to just walk into the country without issue. Their disapproval of everything Trump did suggested they wanted instant citizenship granted to anyone who crosses the U.S. border and to let them loose into our society, no questions asked.
How do we know this? Because they didn’t want the housing facilities for the illegal immigrants but didn’t suggest alternatives. They wanted families kept together but not in those facilities for which they offered no alternatives. Everything outside of a parade welcoming illegal border crossing without the slightest checks to ensure we knew who was entering the country was deemed racist.
But now that Biden is president, none of this is racist. Under Obama, families were separated “for their protection,” according to former Obama administration official-turned CNN analyst Sam Vinograd, even though no evidence exists to suggest this was the case.
In fact, a Senate report from January 2016, while Obama was still president, found that the Department of Health and Human Services had actually given more than a dozen immigrant children to human traffickers because it failed to adequately conduct background checks.
Now under Biden, we’re back to everything being rosy and “for their protection,” via executive orders that won’t do anything to resolve the underlying issue of whether we even want to have borders anymore or not.
Author: Ashe Schow
Source: Daily Wire: With Trump Gone, The Media No Longer Cares About ‘Kids In Cages’