More than 60,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the southern border in 2014, most from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, putting the Obama administration in a difficult position.
"They made a lot of mistakes, but eventually they got some stuff right," said Michelle Brané, who directs the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women's Refugee Commission.
"They started out with sort of a deterrence approach, but realized fairly early on that this was a humanitarian situation," Brané said.
Democrats and immigrants' rights advocates also have criticized the Trump administration's reaction to the latest wave of children and parents from Central America arriving at the border............................
When the surge of migrant children began arriving in 2014, the Obama administration tried some of the same tactics as the Trump administration.
The Obama administration housed migrant children in temporary camps on military bases. And it pushed for long-term detention of migrant families while their asylum cases played out in immigration court, though federal courts blocked that policy.
But then, those tactics shifted. Under Obama, the federal government eventually spent billions of dollars in response to the migrant surge. For instance,the administration greatly expanded the network of shelters contracted by the Department of Health and Human Services that house unaccompanied children. These shelters house the children until they can be placed with a parent or other relative already living in the U.S.
According to Michelle Brané, the Obama administration deserves credit for learning from its mistakes.
"The Trump administration has done basically the opposite," Brané said. "They took exactly what failed, and expanded on it."