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Michelle Obama Gets Fact Checked Over Issue 'Democrats Have Persistently Distorted'

Katie Pavlich
Katie Pavlich  |  August 18, 2020 12:00 PM

Former First Lady Michelle Obama served as the keynote speaker for the DNC Convention Monday night, successfully fulfilling the role of making false accusations and statements about President Trump's record.

On illegal immigration, Mrs. Obama lamented "putting kids in cages" as she claimed President Trump has no empathy.

But the facts and her husband's history as president tell a different story. It was the Obama administration that first instituted the policy of separating children from adults at the border. President Obama was the first to "put kids in cages."

Her statement on the issue was so misleading, it landed her a fact-check from the Associated Press.

What she did not say is that the very same “cages” were built and used in her husband's administration, for the same purpose of holding migrant kids temporarily.

A look at her remark in the keynote address at the opening night of the remote Democratic National Convention:

MICHELLE OBAMA, on Americans: “They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages."

THE FACTS: The reference to cages is misleading and a matter that Democrats have persistently distorted.

Trump used facilities that were built during the Obama-Biden administration to house children at the border. They are chain-link enclosures inside border facilities where migrants were temporarily housed, separated by sex and age.

At the height of the controversy over Trump’s zero-tolerance policy at the border, photos that circulated online of children in the enclosures generated great anger. But those photos — by The Associated Press — were taken in 2014 and depicted some of the thousands of unaccompanied children held by President Barack Obama.

When that fact came to light, some Democrats and activists who had tweeted the photos deleted their tweets. But prominent Democrats have continued to cite cages for children as a distinctive cruelty of Trump.

In fact, Townhall reported on the Obama administration's actions in 2014.

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"It's just chain-link cells so we have aliens sleeping all over the floor and they told us to probably expect another thousand over the next week, week and a half," another Border Patrol agent told Townhall at the time. "We have these huge chain-link cages, 20-feet tall with razor wire around them, this is inside a warehouse. They are probably 50 by 100 [feet] and there's probably 10 or 11 of these big cages like that and so there's probably 100-200 aliens in each cell or cage and there's just park benches right down the middle, two rows of park benches and then they give them these little rubber mats, a little foam pad to lay on. We don't have enough blankets so they're issuing out those foil blankets, it's like a piece of tin foil and that's all they get. There are so many people crammed. The smell is just horrendous, horrendous."

Others also took notice of Mrs. Obama's misleading statement.