The phrase “kids in cages” has become a catchall for the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement in recent years, to the president’s evident frustration. As he pointed out during Thursday night’s presidential debate, he didn’t build the “cages” — the Obama administration did.
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When moderator Kristen Welker asked about the president’s “zero tolerance” policy in 2018 and the separation of thousands of migrant parents from their children, President Trump immediately tried to skirt responsibility by blaming former president Barack Obama.
“They built cages,” he said, referring to the Obama administration. “You know, they used to say I built the cages. And then they had a picture in a certain newspaper and it was a picture of these horrible cages and they said, look at these cages, President Trump built them. And then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him. They built cages.”
To defend taking immigrant kids from their parents, Trump blamed Biden
Biden responded by stating, correctly, that the Obama administration did not systematically separate parents from their children at the border, a practice that generated such backlash that the first lady and Trump’s daughter Ivanka joined the groundswell of people who pressured him to end it.
“Let’s talk about what we’re talking about,” Biden said. “What happened? Parents were ripped — their kids were ripped from their arms and separated and now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal. It’s criminal.”
The two claims at the core of the exchange — that Obama built the cages and Trump did something unprecedented with them — were not wrong. But the wider context and history were missing.
