'Essentially summer camps': how the right is defending family separations

On Monday, the conservative news site Drudge Report filled its famous, all-caps lead story slot with the headline “BORDER BATTLE: USA TAKING IN 250 KIDS PER DAY”. Next to the story was a photo of young children holding guns, implying that the children separated from their parents are gun-toting criminals.

The children in the photo were not traumatised minors who crossed the US-Mexico border with their parents. They weren’t even from Central America – they were Syrians. The photo had been taken in Syria in 2012 by photojournalist Christiaan Triebert, and was a blatantly misleading attempt to try to find some way to make the border policy seem legitimate.

Drudge’s story ran as public figures, religious leaders and politicians on both sides of the aisle condemned the administration’s policy as unusually cruel. In the face of a growing outrage over Donald Trump’s policy on the forced separation of children and their asylum-seeking parents at the southern border, the administration presented a united, defiant front on Monday.

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“The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” the president said at a speech in the morning, before calling for the establishment of a “space force”. Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, dug in her heels: “We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do.”Despite that, staunchest Trump partisans have remained steadfast in support of the separation policy, or dismissive of what they’re calling alarmist rhetoric from the left. Some, such as Ann Coulter, who claimed on Fox News that the children crying in camps are actors, have taken to deception.

Others, such as Breitbart News Tonight host Joel Pollak, who tweeted about his visit to a detention center Friday, are trying to just put a brave face on the situation:

Another common practice among Trump supporters has been conflating the separation of children of parents lawfully seeking asylum with the news of Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign head, being sent to prison over the weekend. It was an argument pushed forth by Rush Limbaugh, who said on his radio show that Manafort had been “officially been separated from his family”.

Fox News host Jesse Watters compared the adult children of white collar criminals with minors on the border. “They want to lock up Eric. They want to lock up Don Jr and they want to lock up Ivanka, and they’ve done nothing wrong. And now they’re upset because illegal alien families are being broken up?” he said on his show.

Katie Pavlich, Townhall.com editor and Fox contributor, used a similar argument:

Conservative radio host Steve Deace, author of the book We Won’t Get Fooled Again about the Christian right, wondered what differed here from when parents go to war.

Bill Mitchell, the ubiquitous Trump supporter, continued his string of consecutive days on Twitter by throwing out all manner of convoluted justifications in the apparent hope one might stick.

He later followed up with a clarification: “You know who REALLY hates illegal immigration? Black voters.” He did not indicate where he found this purported fact.

Like Mitchell, Tomi Lahren attempted to shift the onus for the separations back onto the true villains, the desperate asylum seekers. “[P]arents could stop schlepping their kids over the border illegally,” she offered as a solution in response to a Bill Clinton quote about the cruelty of the practice.

Laura Ingraham similarly attempted to shift our attention to a different set of crimes being committed, in this case much like the president himself has often done, highlighting questionable statistics about how lawless and violent immigrants are once they arrive in the country. She was another commentator who compared child detention centres to “summer camps”.

On r/The_Donald, the Reddit gathering place for Trump supporters, much of that sort of rhetoric has dominated the front page, including a story from Breitbart about an “illegal alien animal” from Mexico who is alleged to have murdered a young boy. A conversation on that thread revolved around the most effective term for referring to undocumented people in the country. “I prefer ‘criminal alien’ over ‘illegal alien’,” one commenter wrote. “It sounds more scary.”

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Laura Bush criticized the administration, but others on the right have been more surprising dissenters.

Bill O’Reilly said: “The government should know how bad this looks and how innocent children are actually suffering. That kind of scenario is unacceptable to most Americans, as exemplified by former first lady Laura Bush’s withering criticism.” Whether it was his sincere conviction or cynical political calculation it’s hard to say.

Alan Dershowitz, recently seen on television as a Trump surrogate, tried to appeal to the president’s better nature. “You have to end this policy,” he said, referring to the trauma the children were suffering. “You’re better than this,” he added.

That strident plea came on Fox & Friends, whose hosts spent the morning arguing over the semantics of what does and does not constitute a cage.

Florida governor Rick Scott said that he is not in favor of the separation policy, but maintained support for stricter immigration policies. Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker announced a surprise reversal in his decision to send his state’s national guard to the border, calling the separation of children “inhumane”.

“Family separation is wicked,” Nebraska senator Ben Sasse wrote on Facebook, adding his dismay. “It is harmful to kids and absolutely should NOT be the default US policy. Americans are better than this.”

A Quinnipiac poll found that while 66% of Americans opposed the policy of enforced separation on the whole, among Republicans 55% support it and only 35% are against it.

“When does public opinion become a demand that politicians just can’t ignore?” Quinnipiac’s assistant director, Tim Malloy, said in a statement about the polling.

That question remains unclear, but it seems likely that as the debate over the Trump administration policy continues, we’re going to soon find out. If the recent past has shown us anything, it’s that Trump has a way of getting the Republican party to fall in line with any number of policies they previously opposed. Just ask Kirstjen Nielsen. She was against the separations before she was for it.