Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden asserted that President Trump’s administration was the first to hold child illegal immigrants in cages.
“We have to straighten things out. Anyone who committed a felony in the meantime would be deported, but we have to take time to take stock of exactly what’s going on, who’s where, what the truth is and what’s going on at the border,” Biden said during an interview with CBS Miami on Tuesday.
The former vice president under President Barack Obama said, “You’ve never seen a time when someone seeking asylum has to seek it from another country. You’ve never seen a circumstance where we’ve put people in cages.”
Biden made the claim as part of his repeated pledge not to deport anyone from the United States during his first 100 days in office if he’s elected president.
PolitiFact found last month that more people were deported from the U.S. during the Obama administration than during the terms of Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Part of this is due to the rising level of migrants crossing the southwest border seeking asylum over the last several years.
The Obama administration deported more than 3 million people, 1.7 million of them with no criminal record, according to Department of Homeland Security data.
Biden first made the claim that the Obama administration “did not hold people in cages” during a Democratic debate late last year.
A 2014 report in the Arizona Republic shows how some migrant children were held in cages while waiting to be processed by federal immigration authorities.
“They are undocumented. They entered the country illegally. And when they were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, they were shipped to Nogales from overwhelmed processing facilities in Texas,” the report said. “But they are still children in cages, not gangsters, not delinquents. Just children, 900 of them, in a makeshift border-town processing center that is larger than a football field.”
Obama’s former head of Immigration Customs Enforcement has claimed holding children in cages at the border was an Obama administration idea.
Biden added that immigration is one of the most important issues for the 2020 campaign for president.
“We are a nation of immigrants,” Biden said. “The way we’re acting both domestically and internationally is a crying shame. It’s not who we are.”
