MSNBC host Rachel Maddow aired photographs shot during the Obama administration to criticize a “zero tolerance” immigration policy of the Trump administration.
On Tuesday, the network host criticized President Trump’s 2018 illegal immigration policy that involved separating children from their parents who attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. While criticizing the Trump administration, Maddow showed photographs of detention facilities taken in 2014 by the Associated Press during the Obama administration, Fox News first reported.
“In terms of permanent damage done to humans, in terms of the severity of the damage deliberately done to humans, the Trump administration, no matter what else they do, they will never, ever get out from the shadow of the fact that they really did, as a policy and a deliberate practice, they really did take little kids away from their moms and dads,” Maddow began the Tuesday night show.
“They outfitted the kids with Mylar blankets and a lump of padding that was supposed to qualify as a mattress, and they told them to sleep on the floor behind chain-link fence, alone in federal detention without their moms and dads,” she said.
MSNBC did not immediately return the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
Former first lady Michelle Obama also mentioned the Trump policy during the 2020 Democratic National Convention. There she said people “watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages.”
The remarks prompted a fact-check from the Associated Press, which mentioned the reference to cages regarding the controversy is a fact “Democrats have persistently distorted.”
“Trump used facilities that were built during the Obama-Biden administration to house children at the border. They are chain-link enclosures inside border facilities where migrants were temporarily housed, separated by sex and age,” the fact-check reads.
“At the height of the controversy over Trump’s zero-tolerance policy at the border, photos that circulated online of children in the enclosures generated great anger. But those photos — by The Associated Press — were taken in 2014 and depicted some of the thousands of unaccompanied children held by President Barack Obama,” the fact-check continues.
