No matter how many times the lie about “family separations” at the southern border is addressed, Democrats will tell it over and over, usually with help from the media. The Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday was no different.
One after another, the candidates nearly broke down in tears over the myth that innocent mothers are needlessly seeing their babies ripped from their arms by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Anyone who has been to the border and who has spoken U.S. Border Patrol agents — that includes me and several of the 2020 Democrats — knows this isn’t true. Which can only mean that Sen. Kamala Harris, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, and the others, are deliberately misleading voters.
Among the total migrants who showed up at the southwest border so far this year — and the total is so far incomplete — nearly 70,000 of them have been unaccompanied children, according to Border Patrol.
That makes up the vast, vast majority of the children that are currently being held at migrant detention facilities in Texas and in Florida and other states. There were no parents from whom to separate them. And that’s what happens when children from Central America are just dumped into the laps of Border Patrol agents. No one knows who they are, where they came from, or where their mothers and fathers intended them to end up. Our bureaucracy is simply supposed to figure it out.
As acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan testified earlier this month, we also know that countless children are separated from an adult who crossed with them at the border because they were found to have been unrelated — a product of the massive network of human smuggling that takes place as illegal immigrants push their way into Texas. Because when you show in the U.S., you can’t be detained if you show up with a kid in tow.
True, some parents have been separated from their children, but it’s few and far between, and usually done for the protection of the children while agents figure out who they are.
But Kamala Harris on stage Wednesday put on a show about visiting one of the detention facilities in Florida, telling the harrowing tale of how she peeked over the fence and saw children “lined up,” separated by gender (which is a good thing), and led in to “barracks.” She said it like she witnessed the second Holocaust.
The children are separated by gender because they range in ages and they’re being led into facilities where they will use restrooms, shower, and sleep for the next several days. There’s no reason for Harris object to an 11-year-old girl being separated from 17-year-old boys, other than to be a drama queen.
