Thread by @PolitiFact

THREAD: @realdonaldtrump’s administration has separated some 2,000 migrant kids from adults after illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Critics say breaking up families this way is a distinctly cruel feature of Trump’s presidency

Yet some Republicans counter that the policy is merely a continuation of President @BarackObama’s approach

So, is @realdonaldtrump’s separation of immigrant families the same policy of @BarackObama? Let’s recap what the Trump administration is doing, before turning to Obama

AG Jeff Sessions in April announced a "zero-tolerance" policy, meaning every person caught crossing the border illegally would be referred for federal prosecution: bit.ly/2lkYhWY

A good number of these people are adult migrants traveling with children. By law, when adults are detained and criminally prosecuted, their children cannot be housed with them in jail: bit.ly/2K28mGh

So, kids are placed in a @HHSGov shelter until they can be released to a legal guardian. Per @DHSgov, some 2,000 children were separated from 1,940 adults from April 19 through May 31

As for Obama, immigration experts said some family separations did occur, but only relatively rarely, and nowhere near the rate of the Trump administration. (Per @DHSgov, the Obama admin did not keep a count of separated families)

"Obama generally refrained from prosecution in cases involving adults who crossed the border with their kids," said Peter Margulies of @RWULaw

Margulies: "The current administration has chosen to prosecute adult border-crossers, even when they have kids. That choice is fundamentally different from the choice made by both Obama and previous presidents of both parties."

Jeh Johnson, Obama’s Homeland Security secretary from 2013 to the end of his presidency, told @NPR such separations occurred in rare cases, but never as a matter of policy.

Obama’s director of domestic policy, @cecmunoz, told the @nytimes the Obama administration briefly weighed the separation of parents from children, before deciding against it.

In contrast, family separations are a feature, not a bug, of @realdonaldtrump’s border policies, said @FitzGeraldUCSD: "The are not the small-scale collateral consequences of a border policy, but rather a deliberate initiative.”

Bottom line: The talking point circulating in some GOP corners that equates @realdonaldtrump’s separating of families with @BarackObama’s immigration policy is bogus. Read more here: bit.ly/2K5IpWC