President Donald Trump said that the new waves of migrants heading toward the US southern border to cross illegally into our country would not be allowed in Thursday afternoon in a speech at the White House. Trump then blamed his predecessor, President Obama, for separating families at the border.
Trump was describing the makeshift detention centers the US will construct for the migrants when a reporter asked, “What about the children, do they stay?”
President Trump said, “We’re working on a system where they stay together.” But then added that the policy of family separation — which caused a major media firestorm for the Trump administration earlier this year — was inherited by he predecessor President Obama.
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
ORLANDO ESTRADA/AFP/Getty Images
“Under the Obama plan you could separate children, they never did anything about that, nobody talks about that,” Trump said. “But under President Obama, they separated children from the parents. We actually put it so that that didn’t happen — when they hear they’re not going to be separated they come. Many, many times over. But President Obama separated the children from the parents and nobody complained. When we continued the exact same law, this country went crazy. So we are going to continue and try to continue what we’re doing.”
WATCH:
Reporting by The Daily Caller showed images of dozens of children being held in caged detention centers under Obama’s watch.
Later in the comments, Trump hit Obama again, saying the holding facilities are being “overrun” with immigrants. “President Obama separated children from families,” Trump said, “All I did was take the same law, then I softened the law. By softening the law, many people came up that wouldn’t have come up if there was separation.”
(RELATED: New Images Show Exactly How Massive The Migrant Caravan Is)