White House Press secretary Jen Psaki was pressed on Wednesday about the Biden administration’s reopening of a temporary facility for migrant children.
The moment: Fox News’ Peter Doocy recalled for Psaki her denial the previous day that President Joe Biden was recreating Trump-era conditions that he condemned during the 2020 campaign as “horrifying.”
- Referring to images that have emerged of trailers to house migrant children at the facility in in Carrizo Springs, Texas, Doocy asked: “Is it kids in containers instead of kids in cages? What is the White House’s description of this?”
Psaki responded that the facility was “revamped” before being reopened in response to a surge of border crossings by unaccompanied minors and COVID-19 capacity limits at permanent detention center.
- “[O]ur objective is to move … these kids quickly from there to vetted, sponsored families and to places where they can safely be,” she added. “This is a difficult situation. It’s a difficult choice. That’s the choice we’ve made.”
Also, Psak noted, migrant children are not being separated from their parents as happened under the Trump administration’s short-lived “zero tolerance” policy.
- “What the last administration did, was separate those kids, rip them from the arms of their parents at the border,” she said. “We are not doing that. That is immoral. And that is not the approach of this administration.”
It’s not just conservatives who have compared Biden’s treatment of migrant children to former President Donald Trump’s.
- While the reopening of the Texas migrant children facility hasn’t sparked the kind of mass protests that greeted its 2019 opening, liberal activists and progressive House Democrats have denounced the move.
- At the time, some observers pointed out that the Obama administration, in which Biden served as vice president, also held migrant children in cages and sometimes separated them from their parents.
