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Notes -
To this day, I see people saying things like "Trump separated families at the border" and "Trump puts kids in cages".
I haven't really checked in on this issue in about 5 years, but I had remembered back when this happened, hearing conflicting reports about whether this was the Trump administration's policies, or if this was something that (like so many other things) had been going on for a long time before him, but for which he got saddled with the blame because of TDS.
I wanted to find out the truth about what happened, and if Trump is uniquely to blame. Quite frankly, I don't really trust anyone or any source (from the left or the right) other than this forum to be honest about the veracity of the accusations, because TDS is so powerful.
"Children in cages" happened under Obama as well near the end of his second term. NGOs started bussing migrant caravans to the border and there was no capacity to process that many arrivals. So they ended up in caged holding areas (along with their parents, or whatever adult was accompanying them).
Under Trump there was an even larger wave. A liberal judge made a ruling that migrants couldn't be held for more than a short period, I believe 3 days, unless the government arrested them arrested them for illegal entry.
It wasn't possible to process them in that time, so the Trump admin decided to start arresting them for illegal entry.
An arrest requires parents to be separated from children. You don't throw kids in jail with their parents, you send them to some sort of social services.
Given the numbers and the short period the services set up for the children were unsurprisingly not adequate.
Congress wouldn't give additional funding, so the situation was hard to improve.
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In my bubble, the only times I see people saying those slogans, it’s in service of criticizing Biden. I’m not sure how long that’s been the case, but it’s at least since Trump was out of office. 5 years sounds about right.
Caveat: I live in Texas, where immigrant labor is an essential part of the supply chain for political talking points.
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TDS can cut both ways.
Some can’t believe Trump could ever do anything right/good, some believe he couldn’t do anything wrong/bad.
Some will exaggerate or inappropriately assign blame, others will downplay and sanewash.
This isn’t a completely new phenomenon (I remember people seriously alleging Obama and Bush were on the verge of establishing a dictatorship), but Trump has an incredible talent at arousing emotion on both sides of the aisle and perhaps generates the strongest reality distortion field ever measured, in US politics anyway.
In Trump’s defense, he retracted the policy himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy
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