Michelle Obama made a misleading claim about the Trump administration’s implementation of the federal family separation policy during a keynote address she gave during the first night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, an Associated Press fact check found.
“They see our leaders labeling fellow citizens enemies of the state while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists,” Obama said of children who are growing up in the United States watching the first term of Trump’s presidency. “They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protesters for a photo-op.”
The AP reported the claim that Trump administration officials ripped families apart and jailed children of illegal immigrants in cagelike detention centers is “misleading” and has become “a matter that Democrats have persistently distorted.”
“She’s right that Trump’s now-suspended policy at the U.S.-Mexico border separated thousands of children from their families in ways that had not been done before,” the outlet wrote in its fact check. “But what she did not say is that the very same ‘cages’ were built and used in her husband’s administration, for the same purpose of holding migrant kids temporarily.”
In her more than 17-minute remarks, Obama assailed Trump for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, painting him as unfit to serve as president and posing a danger to the country if elected for a second term.
“So if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me — they can, and they will if we don’t make a change in this election,” she said. “If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”
After weeks of backlash following leaked images of children being detained at the southwest border in 2018, Trump signed an executive order ending the Department of Homeland Security’s family separation policy.
“We’re going to keep families together, but we still have to maintain toughness or our country will be overrun by people, by crime, by all of the things that we don’t stand for and that we don’t want,” Trump said.
Trump made immigration reform a pillar of his 2016 run for president, promising to “build a wall” between the United States and Mexico and pledging to make “Mexico pay for it.”
Biden has called the family separation policy “a moral failing” of the federal government.
“When children are locked away in overcrowded detention centers and the government seeks to keep them there indefinitely. When our government argues in court against giving those children toothbrushes and soap,” Biden’s campaign says on its website. “When President Trump uses family separation as a weapon against desperate mothers, fathers, and children seeking safety and a better life. When he threatens massive raids that would break up families who have been in this country for years and targets people at sensitive locations like hospitals and schools. When children die while in custody due to lack of adequate care.”
