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The only problem, the photographs making the rounds were taken in 2014, and the abuses illustrated were perpetrated by the hand of the Obama administration. The photographs went viral on social media, and the misguided, although understandable horror was further fueled by Jake Silverstein, the Editor in Chief of the New York Times Magazine, who Tweeted them out, and subsequently was required to issue a #FakeNews mea culpa.
Let me be clear, the Obama administration engaged in a systemic assault on the rights of immigrants during his tenure as the Deporter-in-Chief. And examples continue to emerge. The International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago School of Law recently released a report outlining crimes the Obama administration allegedly committed against refugee children in their custody.
Examples of abuses against immigrant children include:
- Punching a child in the head three times;
- Kicking a child in the ribs;
- Using a stun gun on a boy, causing him to fall to the ground, shaking, with his eyes rolling back in his head;
- Running over a 17-year-old with a patrol vehicle and then punching him several times;
- Verbally abusing detained children, calling them dogs and “other ugly things”;
- Denying detained children permission to stand or move freely for days and threatening children who stood up with transfer to solitary confinement in a small, freezing room;
- Denying a pregnant minor medical attention when she reported pain, which preceded a stillbirth;
- Subjecting a 16-year-old girl to a search in which they “forcefully spread her legs and touched her private parts so hard that she screamed”;
- Leaving a 4-pound premature baby and her minor mother in an overcrowded and dirty cell full of sick people, against medical advice;
- Throwing out a child’s birth certificate and threatening him with sexual abuse by an adult male detainee.
These types of abuses against refugee children were a dirty open secret of the Obama administration, and were largely ignored by the legacy media, as evidenced by the fact that prominent forces on the left seized the opportunity by circulating the 2014 photographs that parenthetically are not all that dissimilar from those released in 2004 depicting Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse. Those on the left either have very short memories, or they were hoping that we do. We don’t.
Cindy Carcamo, a journalist who has faithfully covered immigration for The Los Angeles Times, appeared on PBS News Hour over the weekend, and explained how President Trump's policy of enforcing the criminal law against illegal entry and separating mothers from their children also occurred when Obama implemented his policy of jailing refugee mothers with their children in deportation internment camps.
It should also be noted that Obama similarly implemented an aggressive strategy of criminally enforcing the immigration law. When Obama left office 52% of all federal criminal prosecutions were for immigration related crimes of the exact nature that Trump and Sessions are now focused on prosecuting. Typically, it was reported that Carcamo is now facing a backlash for straying from the Democrat controlled narrative by infusing some truth into the immigration debate.
Unfortunately, the outrage we are currently witnessing from hyperpartisan Democrats, far left leaning pundits, and former Obama administration officials about Trump's policy (which is abhorrent) has been conveniently manufactured for political gain. It should also be noted that these same people now voicing outrage were curiously (strategically?) silent about the plight of immigrant children when the Deporter-in-Chief was torturing them in deportation jails.
For the record, I’m outraged by both Obama AND Trump. I'm also disgusted because the groundwork for Trump’s enforcement policies was engineered by Obama, and now it is too late to do anything about it. If only Democrats were as outraged when Obama was President, and they actually had influence on the Executive Branch. But I get it, they had a false narrative to advance.
The silver lining from all of this is that the abuse of immigrants is finally being exposed on a wider scale, as I have grown hoarse screaming from rooftops to deaf ears. And to think all it took was for a Republican to win the Presidency.
Matthew Kolken is an immigration lawyer and the managing partner of Kolken & Kolken, located in Buffalo, New York. His legal opinions and analysis are regularly solicited by various news sources, including MSNBC, CNN, FOX News, The Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times, among others. You can follow him @mkolken.
First, no one can argue with Matt's point that Obama helped to pave the way for Trump when it came to brutal and inhuman treatment of immigrants, despite some differences in detail - such as the fact that, at least according to the article that Matt cites, Obama did not separate detained parents and children, as Trump is now doing, unless I have missed something in reading Professor Satsuki Ina's article.
Second, it is also quite true that the Democrats have been far too weak in the past in speaking out against anti-immigrant abuses and restrictionist policies by both Democratic and Republican administrations. There has been a big element of "me too" in attempts by Democratic politicians - and presidents - over the years to show that they can be "tough on immigrants" too, just like the Republicans. Among all too many examples of this, one thinks of President Clinton's blockade of Haiti in order to stop Haitian refugees from leaving their own country!
Even Trump has not (so far) gone that far.
But pointing out the similarities between Obama and Trump is only part of the story. The other part is the differences, including the following:
1) Obama's immigration policies were not accompanied by the overt racism and prejudice of Trump's agenda. To the best of my knowledge, Obama did not label Hispanic immigrants as "criminals", "rapists" and, most recently "animals". He did not label all Muslims as "terrorists" or attempt to impose a Muslim ban on legal immigration. With regard to black immigrants, I so not recall any time that Obama referred to African countries, including the one where his own father came from, as "shithole countries". Nor can I recall Obama's ever saying that America should prefer "countries like Norway" in terms of admitting immigrants. These are not trivial differences, I would respectfully submit. On immigration, as with everything else, words matter.
2) Especially on the legal immigration side, the differences between Trump and Obama are almost like those between day and night. I am not aware that Obama ever called for abolishing extended family immigration and the visa lottery and trying to link them with crime and terror, as Trump has done.
(It is true that the Democrats in the Senate "Gang of 8" went along with their GOP counterparts in agreeing to throw the Diversity Visa Lottery under the bus in order to get a CIR bill passed by the Senate which would have legalized millions of unauthorized immigrants.)
But has we all know, this concession was not enough to save that bill in the GOP-controlled House.
Nor, so far as I can recall, did Obama ever support major overall reductions in legal immigration, as Trump and his Republican supporters are now doing. Administratively, the Trump administration is making approvals of H-1B, family sponsored green cards, and many other petitions and applications for immigration benefits harder to get than in the past - though biased and unfair RFE's and denials certainly did not originate with this administration.
There is a strong argument that Trump agenda on reducing legal immigration is deliberately intended to appeal to his white supremacist base. No one could make the same claim about President Obama's policies on legal immigration.
3) Did Obama ever call for building a 30-foot wall along the entire US-Mexican border, with all the negative symbolism that this involves (think Berlin Wall, Warsaw Ghetto Wall, etc)? I am not aware that he did.
4) No US president in history, so far as I am aware, has told as many lies, and done so as often, about immigration and immigrants as Trump has done, for the express purpose of stirring up hatred and prejudice against immigrants of a different color or religion from the majority of Americans. Examples are too numerous to list here specifically. See my own ilw.com comment:
Trump's Art of the Big Lie:
posted on May 26 about Trump's use of this strategy as an essential part of his anti-immigrant agenda.
In that comment, among other examples, I mention a fantasy that Trump has repeated more than once to the effect that a radicalized Muslim immigrant who killed 8 people in New York City last October had allegedly sponsored 24 relatives for immigration. Not a single one of these purported "relatives" has ever been identified, to the best of my knowledge.
Indeed, Mark Krikorian, the head of the restictionist Center of Immigration Studies and generally a Trump supporter on immigration, was quoted as saying that Trump's above claim was impossible under current law.
Roger Algase
Attorney at Law