Bay of Pics Media fakery targets Trump with photos of Obama-era child trafficking. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270299/bay-pics-lloyd-billingsley

Over the Memorial Day weekend, photos of Central American children at a U.S. holding facility began to appear online. Democrats and their media allies quickly hailed the pics as the latest exhibit of anti-Trump hysteria.

“Look at these photos,” Linda Sarsour tweeted.

“Speechless,” tweeted Antonio Villaraigosa, former Los Angeles mayor and candidate for governor of California. “This is not who we are as a nation.”

“All of these photos are disturbing, but the first two are especially awful,” tweeted New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, linking to headline hailing “First glimpse of immigrant children at holding facility.” And so on.

For the breathless tweeters, the photos were prima facie evidence that, as CNN’s April Ryan wondered, “is the Trump administration involved in a child sex-trafficking ring?”

Antonio Arellano, who claims to work for ABC in Houston, circulated a story about an ICE detention center in Texas with “a prison bus just for babies.” CNN’s Ana Navarro responded, “America, this cannot be who we are” and those who picked up Arrellano’s story included Kasie Hunt of NBC, Sharon Waxman of TheWrap, actor Alyssa Milano, and POTUS 44 staffer Michael Simon and Democrat Party strategist Zac Petkanas.

Trouble was, the story was from 2014, long before the Trump administration. Likewise, As Saagar Enjeti noted in the Daily Caller, the detention center photos “stem from a 2014 Arizona Central story showing migrant children in steel cages. The cages were implemented at the height of the Central American migrant crisis under the Obama administration.”

The eager Silverstein took it as a reminder “not to RT things while distracted w family on the weekend.” Over at CNN, a colleague of Ryan defended the child-trafficking charge as “a thought experiment and not meant to be taken literally.” For his part, President Trump was not surprised.

“Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the Border in steel cages,” the president tweeted. “They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires.” Further, “The Fake Mainstream Media has, from the time I announced I was running for President, run the most highly sophisticated & dishonest Disinformation Campaign in the history of politics.” The president has a strong case but there’s more to the story.

Those responsible for the children in detention centers are the parents who put them in the hands of professional smugglers, a deliberate act of child abuse. The previous administration encouraged them to do so in order to take advantage of his illegal DACA program, a quest to expand the Democrats’ imported electorate. Aside from the date, the pictures were hardly the full story on the children.

According to the original 2014 Arizona Republic story that accompanied the photos, “they are fed and clothed, kept clean and cool, far better off than if they were walking through the desert in June temperatures.” The 900 children “entered the country illegally” and when apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border protection, “they were shipped to Nogales from overwhelmed processing facilities in Texas.”

The Nogales facility “is a way station where the children are identified, examined for health problems by the U.S. Public Health Service, vaccinated and then moved to other facilities in Texas, Oklahoma and California until they are placed with relatives already in the country to await their day in Immigration Court.”

A media tour “dispelled rumors of ill treatment” and the CBP agents “seem to be genuinely compassionate in their interactions with the children. The facility is clean and air-conditioned.” U.S. officials even “substituted corn tortillas for flour ones” in accordance with the children’s dietary preferences.

As the June 18, 2014 article also revealed, border agents, “have apprehended about 47,000 unaccompanied minors who crossed the border into the U.S. illegally from Mexico. Almost three-fourths of the children apprehended are from Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador.

The CBP estimates that apprehensions of minors this year may reach 90,000.”

That massive child trafficking went down when POTUS 44 occupied the White House. If the old-line establishment media bosses want to recover from this fakery, they should run some detailed, accurate stories on the previous administration.

For example, provide some insight on the Islamic terrorists who killed U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi. Why did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leave them so unprotected? Likewise, who are the federal agents who knew about Nidal Hasan’s plan to kill Americans but did nothing to stop him? And what are these people doing now?

FBI operatives Peter Strzok and Lisa Page said the president wanted to know “everything we’re doing.”  What did the president know and when did he know it? What did the president authorize about the spies in the Trump campaign? As Michael Corleone said, that’s a terrific story, and the public just might like the full truth.

Meanwhile, President Trump knows that the 2014 child trafficking is not who we are as a nation.  That’s why the president wants a wall, border security, and the rule of law to prevail.

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