but none of these features are new, child seperation and children dying in ICE facilities happened under the Obama administration and it wasn't a big deal then. What changed?
Not really. Here are some things that changed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/politics/fact-check-tr...
This was a quote I thought relevant, however because I don't think it was rainbows and unicorns under Obama either:
"The Obama administration did detain families together — some indefinitely — in hopes of deterring future migrants back in 2014, earning protests and public outrage at the time." [1]
[1]https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/...
>By the numbers: Under the Obama administration, total ICE deportations were above 385,000 each year in fiscal years 2009-2011, and hit a high of 409,849 in fiscal 2012. The numbers dropped to below 250,000 in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.
>Under Trump, ICE deportations fell to 226,119 in fiscal 2017, then ticked up to over 250,000 in fiscal 2018 and hit a Trump administration high of 282,242 this fiscal year (as of June).
Edit: I'm not saying I support Trump or ICE, my point is that Obama was hardly a leftist.
Read again. Nobody asked that.
But the Right is the only place that that happens.
> this has been an ongoing problem for a while.
No, the family separation policy has not been going on for a while; the Obama policy was not to detain illegal crossers with children (absent some other reason for detention), specifically to avoid that, and not to force legal asylum-seekers away from standard border crossings to force them to be illegal crossers in the first place.
That's not too say that there weren't humanitarian problems at the border under Obama, but they weren't at the same level as those deliberately created by Trump policies.
The rate of deportations wasn't the issue, the incidence and conditions of detention of children was the issue; the incidence of that was not as high, nor the conditions as bad, under Obama. But, even so:
> and hit a Trump administration high of 282,242 this fiscal year (as of June).
The federal fiscal years ends at the end of September, so “as of June” is 8-9 months of the year, depending on whether it's June 1, June 30, or somewhere in between, so it's on pace for 376k-423k, assuming a flat line throughout the year though continuing increase throughout the year might be more consistent with the year over year change. So, Trump started low in fiscal 2017 (which started under Obama and occurred largely while Trump was still getting people in place, with immigration policy focussed on fighting over the Muslim ban), and has rapidly reversed the deportation declines of the last 4 years of the Obama administration in the two years since, coming back up to a pace around or exceeding Obama’s peak year. So even if deportation numbers were the issue, your presentation would be misleading.
This certainly was not true and you have not provided sources saying so.