WaPo, Biden admin torched over re-opening of ‘migrant facility for children’ amid border uptick

The Washington Post, along with the Biden administration, generated backlash and mockery after the Department of Homeland Security reopened a facility to house migrant children that was shuttered under former President Donald Trump.

Critics took to social media to blast the paper’s use of the phrase “migrant facility for children” instead of the “kids in cages” slogan the Post and other left-leaning media outlets often used to describe the manner in which migrant children were housed under the Trump administration.

Also, most of the same media outlets that used the “kids in cages” mantra during the Trump administration failed to note that migrant children were first kept in so-called cages during the Obama administration.

“Dozens of migrant teens boarded vans Monday for the trip down a dusty road to a former man camp for oil field workers here, the first migrant child facility opened under the Biden administration,” the Post reported from Carrizo Springs, Texas. “The emergency facility — a vestige of the Trump administration that was open for only a month in summer 2019 — is being reactivated to hold up to 700 children ages 13 to 17.”

The Post went on to report, “Government officials say the camp is needed because facilities for migrant children have had to cut capacity by nearly half because of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has been inching up, with January reporting the highest total — more than 5,700 apprehensions — for that month in recent years.”

The Post’s story ran under the headline, “First migrant facility for children opens under Biden.” But when Trump was in office dealing with the migrant caravan crisis in 2018, the Post ran stories under headlines including, “The American tradition of caging children,” and, “The real reason we’re locking children in cages.”

The following year, the paper published a story titled, “Viewing US border cells derided as ‘cages,’ Central American officials pledge more immigration cooperation.”

As recently as September, the paper’s editorial board noted, “The tableaux of caged migrant children, torn from their parents’ arms, should be among the most enduring images produced by the president’s policies.” The op-ed was attempting to describe what Trump’s second term may look like, though his policies ended the migrant caravans.

Other media outlets appeared to soft-pedal the housing phraseology.

According to USA Today, the Carrizo Springs facility is set to house up to 700 migrant children within the next few weeks as, once again, illegal immigration has become a problem along the Southwest U.S. border. But the writers of the story seemed to not realize that the recent increase in illegal crossings — and, thus, the need to ‘house’ illegal alien children, was the direct result of reversing the previous president’s policies, which they described as “hardline.”

“The move came after President Joe Biden signed a raft of executive orders aimed at unwinding the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies, including establishing a task force to reunify children separated from their parents or guardians at the border under former President Donald Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy,” the USA Today article said.

Trump’s border enforcement and immigration policies, however they are described, led to far less illegal immigration, which in turn led to fewer migrant children having to be housed at all.

Critics of the Post’s story took to social media to rip its description of ‘housing’ for migrant children.

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Jon Dougherty

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