For at least the second time during this presidential campaign cycle, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has claimed that the Obama administration he was a part of never put “people in cages.”
In an interview with a local CBS affiliate in which he was asked about immigration policy, the former vice president ripped into President Donald Trump and claimed “we’ve never seen” a time when migrants were caged — despite the fact that it was the Obama regime that first built and used cages for migrants and their children.
"You’ve never seen a circumstance where we’ve put people in cages.”@JoeBiden rips @realDonaldTrump's record on immigration but omits that it was the Obama administration that built the cages. pic.twitter.com/fLx02204tj
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) April 28, 2020
Asked if he would still place a moratorium on all deportations within his first 100 days in office, Biden responded:
Because 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. And that’s the thing we should be doing now.
Because the idea…Jim, you’ve never seen a time when someone seeking asylum has to seek it from another country. You have never seen a circumstance where we have put people in cages. We have to sake [sic] stock of where we are. We are a nation of immigrants.
The interviewer, meanwhile, merely nodded and went on to the next topic, which was asking Biden how he ‘wins Florida.’ He simply allowed let Biden get away with this massive lie.
This isn’t even close to being in dispute: The Obama administration was the first to cage migrants and their children. It has been well-documented, beginning with a photo essay published by the Arizona Republic in June 2014.
But this isn’t the first time Biden has tried to claim his former president didn’t ‘cage’ children. He made the same false claim during a Democrat debate in September.
“We didn’t lock people up in cages. We didn’t separate families. We didn’t do all of those things, number one,” Biden said in response to a question from moderator/journalist/activist Jorge Ramos in Houston.
Yes, they did, and even Obama’s then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has said as much.
“Chain link barriers, partitions, fences, cages, whatever you want to call them, were not invented on January 20, 2017, okay?” he said during the Aspen Ideas Festival in late June 2017, the Washington Examiner reported — a clear indication that blaming President Trump for ‘inventing cages’ is wrong.
“But during that 72-hour period, when you have something that is a multiple — like four times — of what you’re accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you’ve got to find places quickly to put kids. You can’t just dump 7-year-old kids on the streets of McAllen or El Paso,” he continued. “And so these facilities were erected … they put those chain-link partitions up so you could segregate young women from young men, kids from adults until they were either released or transferred to HHS.”
All of which was actually done to protect the children, believe it or not.
His comments match up with those made by former Trump acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Thomas Homan, who at the time was serving as the executive associate director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Johnson during the Obama administration.
“I would answer the question, ‘The kids are being housed in the same facility built under the Obama administration.’ If you want to call them cages, call them cages. But if the left wants to call them cages and the Democrats want to call them cages then they have to accept the fact that they were built and funded in FY 2015,” Homan has said, according to the Washington Examiner.
Biden will have to answer for this lie at some point; you can bet President Trump will make sure of that during their debates.
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Jon is a staff writer for BizPac Review with 30 years' worth of reporting experience, as well as an author and U.S. Army veteran. He has a BA in political science from Ashford University and an MA in national security studies/intelligence analysis from American Military University.
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