This weekend, CNN became that newsroom, arguing that the deportations that occurred under Obama are different from the deportations of today because a former Obama official says so. This is a real thing published by a real newsroom.

“Yes, Obama deported more people than Trump but context is everything,” reads the CNN headline.

“[I]immigration advocacy groups criticized then-President Barack Obama as the ‘deporter in chief’ during his bid for reelection in 2012,” the report reads. “It’s a perception that former Vice President Joe Biden will have to answer for as he campaigns to carry on Obama’s legacy.”

The report adds, “The issue is complicated.”

Is it though?

The article goes on to note that many more migrants were “deported” during the Clinton and Bush administrations. It then argues that those “numbers alone don’t tell the whole story.” This is where the article turns to former Obama domestic policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz, who spends the rest of the article explaining why it was different when her former employer deported migrants.

“A straight numbers-by-numbers comparison doesn’t provide an accurate picture of what was going on in the administration,” said Muñoz, who now heads the left-wing New America Foundation.

She added, “If you’re not targeting and focused on people who recently arrived, then the border is effectively open. It is more humane to be removing people who have been here two weeks than it is to be removing people who have been here for 20 years and have families.”

Muñoz told CNN that Trump just wants to deport as many migrants as possible, and CNN responded by reinforcing her position.

“It’s impossible to ignore [Trump’s] rhetoric,” the CNN article claims. “He infamously called some Mexican immigrants ‘rapists,’ and focused his presidency around the idea that he would build a wall, get tough with Mexico and deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible.”

Amazingly enough, no other expert is quoted in the CNN article. The only other source cited by CNN is the Cato Institute, which reports that “deportations from the interior of the country … were on the downswing during most of the Obama administration.”

The article mentions then this could be a problem for 2020 Democratic front-runner Joe Biden. The article also acknowledges that the Obama administration was good at deporting people from the interior of the country when it notes that, “Trump still has not reached anywhere near the level of interior removals as the early Obama administration.” This apparent contradiction of their expert source goes unexplained.

But Muñoz gets the last word anyway.

“People are in terror,” she said. “They’re scared of sending their children to school. That is a very, very different dynamic. There are no enforcement priorities in the Trump administration. That’s the point. In the Obama administration, there were clear priorities.”

So, just to be clear: Yes, the Obama administration deported many, many, many migrants. But that was different. The Obama administration did it with care and purpose. Or something.