Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) admitted Wednesday that President Donald Trump is merely continuing immigration policies that Barack Obama started.
The open-borders Democrat said that Obama technically began some of the same policies she and other progressives now criticize, but she defended Obama at the same time, saying Trump took those policies to a “monstrous level.”
“Some people will say, ‘Those were Obama’s policies.’ And I say yes and no,” Omar said on BET’s Black Coffee.
Thanks, Obama
With the immigration crisis dominating headlines, progressives including Omar and fellow Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have criticized the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants kept in detention centers at the border. The ongoing immigration debate has been inflamed recently over alleged overcrowding in so-called “concentration camps” and images of a migrant who drowned with his toddler while crossing the Rio Grande.
But amid all the hyperbole about children in cages, progressives have largely ignored that President Trump was not the first to build “concentration camps” at the border. Democrats have accused Trump of unprecedented cruelty toward migrants, despite the president building on Obama’s policies and using some of the same facilities. Some news outlets are even still using Obama-era photos of detention centers in articles about Trump’s immigration policy.
In an unusual moment, Omar, one of Trump’s most outspoken critics, admitted that some of Trump’s policies started with his predecessor — but hedged that the 44th president’s policies weren’t as harsh as Trump’s.
“[Obama] might have thought there was an easier path to dealing with the crisis by implementing for a short period of time policies that he couldn’t have the foresight that the next person who was going to come in was going to take it to a monstrous level,” Omar said. “That is sometimes what we get. When you open the door to darkness, a monster will come out. That’s how some of these policies have really deadly impacts on our lives and some of these policymakers don’t get to worry about that or care about that.”
The border crisis spiked under Obama, and the former president built facilities to handle the influx. Obama’s former secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, admitted as much at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Friday, saying: “Chain link barriers, partitions, fences, cages, whatever you want to call them, were not invented on Jan. 20, 2017, okay?”
Crisis at the border
Despite the fact that Obama built detention facilities, Democrats have accused Trump of crimes against humanity over reports of overcrowding and worsening conditions in the migrant shelters. However, Trump and Republicans have blamed grand-standing progressives for refusing to address the crisis, which only months ago they called “manufactured” as Trump battled with Democratic leadership over wall funding.
The crisis has only worsened since. Democrats including Omar, AOC, and others nearly derailed a $4.6 billion humanitarian aid bill that Congress passed last week to replenish funds for immigration officials, who are floundering to handle the influx. Progressives insisted on a House bill that would have blocked money for border enforcement and asylum reform.
Indeed, the left has refused to engage with Republicans on much-needed asylum reform to eliminate frivolous claims, as thousands of asylum seekers — many of whom are economic migrants — storm the border in increasing numbers.
Illegal immigration reached a 13-year high in May with 144,000 apprehended at the border. The Trump administration says they don’t have the resources to accommodate the influx, and thousands of migrants have been dropped off on the streets of border towns in recent months.
Radicals turn on Obama
While Obama was of course a liberal, Omar and fellow radicals like Ocasio-Cortez are more extreme. Omar is a brazen advocate of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), mass amnesty, and other extreme immigration policies. She recently criticized President Trump for using the term “illegal alien,” Fox News reported.
Given her radical positions, it’s not surprising that Omar has a problem with the more mainstream Obama’s response to the migrant crisis. Indeed, this is not the first time the progressive criticized Obama: She slammed the “hope and change” president for “caging of kids” in March, though she later retracted her comments under pressure.
She also criticized Obama’s drone program, and said that the president “operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor.”
These Democrats are so radical, they make Obama look conservative. This is the new Democratic Party, apparently: open borders and proud.
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