CLAIM: MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff claimed on Monday that former President Barack Obama’s administration “didn’t” separate migrant children from the adults they arrived with at the United States-Mexico border.
VERDICT: False. Former President Donald Trump’s administration was not the only White House to separate migrant children from the adults they arrived with at the southern border — though it was certainly the most publicized.
During an interview with Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican National Convention (RNC), Soboroff asked, “Will we continue to see policies like separating 5,000 children deliberately from their parents?”
In response, Trump Jr. pointed to the Obama administration’s policy that similarly separated migrant children from adults at the border.
“You know they didn’t do that, sir,” Soboroff said.
Soboroff’s claim that the Obama administration did not separate migrant children from adults at the border has been disproven by multiple fact-checkers, including CNN and the Associated Press (AP).
“Under past administrations, some border-crossers were occasionally criminally prosecuted, and were thus separated from their families,” a CNN fact check stated. “Separations did sometimes occur under Obama, but they were non-routine and much less frequent, according to immigration experts and former Obama officials.”
Likewise, when First Lady Michelle Obama suggested that “children are torn from their families and thrown into cages” under Trump’s policies, AP fact checkers corrected her claims by noting that the so-called “cages” — which are actually migrant holding facilities — were built by the Obama administration.
“Trump used facilities that were built during the Obama-Biden administration to house children at the border,” the AP fact check stated. “They are chain-link enclosures inside border facilities where migrants were temporarily housed, separated by sex and age.”
“The Obama administration separated migrant children from families under certain limited circumstances, like when the child’s safety appeared at risk or when the parent had a serious criminal history,” the AP fact check continued.
Court records have also disproven Soboroff’s claims.
In a 2016 opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the court confirmed that, since before 2001, adults have oftentimes been separated from the migrant children with whom they arrived at the border.
“Families who were detained had to be housed separately, splitting up parents and children,” the opinion stated, citing records from 2007.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
