Over the past several weeks, hype over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” illegal immigration policy has reached a fever pitch, especially in the mainstream media, which blames President Donald Trump for separating children from parents at the border.
The media claim Trump can easily fix the problem, yet is stonewalling to allegedly push his immigration agenda. Trump created the problem and is the only one who can fix it, the narrative goes.
However, according to conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, the media are lying to your face. Trump cannot single-handedly stop what’s happening at the border because it’s not a problem he created.
On Monday, Shapiro debunked lies the media has pushed to bolster its agenda against the White House.
1. Trump did not establish a policy to separate children from parents.
It’s perhaps the lie that has been most repeated in the media. One MSNBC correspondent even voiced her anger on Twitter over the administration’s insistence that it did not create a policy to separate families.
However, according to Shapiro, Trump isn’t to blame for the policy, but rather a 1997 federal government settlement and appeals court ruling.
In 1997, the federal government made an agreement in a case called Flores not to keep unaccompanied illegal immigrant children in custody beyond 20 days. The settlement said nothing about accompanied illegal immigrant children – children who crossed the border with their parents. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals then ruled that accompanied children also could not be held in custody under the terms of the settlement. This meant that the government either had to release whole families, or that the government had to separate parents from children.
Left-leaning fact-checking website Snopes fact checked this claim and ruled it false. However, as Shapiro noted, the settlement made no mention of illegal immigrant children. The law mandates that unaccompanied minors found in the U.S. be held in government custody. This has been a longstanding legal requirement.
But what’s different now is that under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, each adult who enters the U.S. illegally is being criminally prosecuted, while previous administrations exercised more discretion, usually only prosecuting those arrested for drug-related offenses and those with previous criminal records.
The increase in criminal prosecutions has lead to an increase in family separations, since children cannot follow…
