CBS News has the dubious distinction of publishing what must be this week’s most absurd fact-check. And it was a high bar.
On Thursday, during the final 2020 presidential debate, Democratic nominee Joe Biden lied, claiming that the Obama administration did not separate children from families caught illegally crossing into the United States. The Obama administration, with Biden serving all eight years as vice president, most absolutely did this. But you would never know this from following CBS News’s “fact-check” of the evening.
“These 500-plus kids came with parents,” Biden said, attacking the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies. “They separated them at the border to make it a disincentive to come to begin with. ‘Be real tough. We’re really strong.’”
He added, “And guess what? They cannot. … Coyotes didn’t bring them over. Their parents were with them. They got separated from their parents. And it makes us a laughingstock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”
President Trump interjected, “They did it. We changed the policy. They did it. We changed.”
“We did not separate the [children],” Biden asserted falsely.
Trump persisted, saying, “They built the cages. Who built the cages, Joe?”
Biden declined to answer the question. The answer, by the way, is that the holding facilities used by the Trump administration were leftovers from previous administrations — including the Obama administration, which greatly expanded family immigration detention in 2014 and 2015.
Now, over in the parallel universe inhabited by CBS News, this is how the network fact-checked the moment.
“Claim: Biden says ‘we did not separate’ children from their families, and he says the Trump administration did,” CBS reports.
Its fact-check rating reads: “True.”
CBS’s justification for this rating reads thus: “The Obama administration only separated migrant children from families under certain limited circumstances, such as when the child’s safety appeared at risk or when the parent had a serious criminal history, according to the Associated Press.”
So, after admitting that the Obama administration did this, they give the opposite answer as their fact-check.
CBS also “fact-checked” Trump’s claim that the Obama administration built “cages” at the border. CBS rates this claim “misleading.” Its explanation for the rating reads thus (you really need to read the entire thing to appreciate it):
Photographs taken in 2014 surfaced on social media of facilities in McAllen, Texas, and Nogales, Arizona, of immigrants behind a chain-link fence in a warehouse converted to a detention facility during a spike in incidences of unaccompanied minors crossing the border. The McAllen facility had been converted to house immigrant children, according to local reports.
The Obama administration detained migrant families and unaccompanied minors in these temporary Border Patrol stations after apprehending them and before transferring families to ICE detention centers and the unaccompanied kids to the U.S. refugee agency. This has been the practice at the border during both Republican and Democratic administrations. The Obama administration did dramatically expand family immigration detention in 2014 and 2015 — when it faced a surge in border crossings — and was sued over the length of detention children endured.
In a June 2019 interview at the Aspen Institute, President Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson explained, “Very clearly, chain link, barriers, partitions, fences, cages, whatever you want to call them, were not invented on January 20, 2017.” But he said the detention was meant to be temporary, noting that under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, children could only be held in those facilities for 72 hours before being transferred to HHS. “But during that 72-hour period, when you have something that is a multiple, like four times, of what you’re accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you’ve got to find places quickly to put kids. You can’t just dump 7-year-old kids on the streets of McAllen or El Paso,” Johnson said.
The Obama administration detained migrant families and unaccompanied minors in these temporary Border Patrol stations after apprehending them and before transferring families to ICE detention centers and the unaccompanied kids to the U.S. refugee agency. This has been the practice at the border during both Republican and Democratic administrations. The Obama administration did dramatically expand family immigration detention in 2014 and 2015 — when it faced a surge in border crossings — and was sued over the length of detention children endured.
So, to be clear, the Obama administration did not technically build the “cages.” It just used them with gusto, “dramatically” expanding family immigration detention in 2014 and 2015, according to CBS.
Somehow, this lands the president a “misleading” rating, whereas Biden gets away with a “true” rating for making a demonstrably false statement. There is really nothing more to add to it than that. Just stand back and appreciate the sheer absurdity of it all.
Who fact-checks the “fact-checkers”?
