Porterville Recorder

Trump, critics trade angry immigratio­n charges

- By JILL COLVIN

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Democratic critics traded outraged, sometimes plainly false accusation­s about immigratio­n Tuesday as the debate over “lost” children and the practice of separating families caught crossing the border illegally reached a new boiling point.

False charges flew on both sides. The White House wrongly blamed Democrats for forcing his administra­tion to separate children from parents. Liberal activists and others, including some from media outlets, tried to highlight the issue by tweeting photos of young people in steel cages that actually were taken during the Obama administra­tion. Others seized on reports the government had “lost” more than 1,000 children, though that wasn’t quite the case.

It all comes just in time for the midterm elections as Republican­s and Democrats try to rally core voters by pointing fingers at one another. Trump won the presidency promising to build a wall along the southern border and end illegal immigratio­n, and the White House believes stressing the same issues will drive voters to the polls and help the GOP hang on to their majorities in the Senate and House.

The White House is “really beating the immigratio­n drum in the lead-up to the midterm elections as a rallying cry and as a way of mobilizing voter support for Trump and the candidates that he chooses,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute and former commission­er of the U.S. Immigratio­n and Naturaliza­tion Service during the Clinton administra­tion. “It does seem to provoke a ratcheting up across the board.”

Indeed, the situation grew so hostile over the holiday weekend that the president’s eldest daughter, White House adviser Ivanka Trump, came under fire for tweeting a photo of herself and her youngest son in their pajamas Sunday morning.

“Focus on what is before you, on what you can control and ignore the trolls!” she later wrote.

During a White House conference call on Tuesday, senior adviser Stephen Miller contended the “the current immigratio­n and border crisis” is “the exclusive product of loopholes in federal immigratio­n law that Democrats refuse to close.”

That was after Trump lit up social media over the weekend by falsely claiming there was a “horrible law” that separates children from their parents after they cross the border illegally. He had said previously that “we have to break up families” at the border because “the Democrats gave us that law.”

 ?? AP PHOTO BY EVAN VUCCI ?? In this May 28, photo, President Donald Trump speaks during a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va.
AP PHOTO BY EVAN VUCCI In this May 28, photo, President Donald Trump speaks during a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va.

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