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Headlines Blast Trump For Putting Migrant Children In Old Japanese Internment Camp

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Virginia Kruta Associate Editor
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Multiple outlets reported Wednesday that President Donald Trump is housing migrant children in a former Japanese internment camp.

Similar headlines came from:

While the statement is true, most of the headlines leave out the fact that Fort Sill, Oklahoma — which was temporarily repurposed in the 1940s as an internment camp — is, to this day, a fully operational Army base that has been in use since Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan staked out the land in 1869.

That didn’t stop many from running with the narrative, regardless. (RELATED: MSNBC: No, Migrant Children Are Not Kept In Cages)

And Trump critics were only too happy to jump on the bandwagon:

They also left out the fact that when the border faced a surge of unaccompanied minors in 2014, then-President Barack Obama also opted to use Fort Sill as a temporary housing location for migrant children.

“As most Oklahomans have heard and seen on the news, there are currently between 1,000 and 1,500 migrant children being housed in dormitories on Fort Sill, an Army base in southwestern Oklahoma near Lawton (among other places across the country),” Oklahoma Policy Institute reported in July of 2014.

Fort Sill was just one of several locations the Obama administration used to temporarily house migrant children. Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, served as another.

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