Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com loves to uncritically present false or misleading statements from the Trump White House as undisputed fact, refusing to subject them to even the most basic level of fact-checking. This happened again in a June 18 CNS article by Susan Jones.
Jones starts off by highlighting the "flurry of tweets" from President Trump in response to the "Monday-morning media hysteria about children being 'ripped' from their mothers or fathers when that parent crosses the border illegally," one of those claims being that it's the Democrats' fault that the Trump administration is separating families at the border due to some unspecified law, not Trump's.
In fact, as an actual news outlet that did an actual fact-check pointed out: "Immigrant families are being separated at the border not because of Democrats and not because some law forces this result, as Trump insists. They’re being separated because the Trump administration, under its zero-tolerance policy, is choosing to prosecute border-crossing adults for any offenses.
Jones also uncritically repeated Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's assertion that, in Jones' words, "there is no policy of separating families at the border, as long as they are seeking asylum at ports of entry." In fact, as the above fact-check also noted, it is, in fact, a Trump policy because Trump is blaming the Democrats for it and Attorney General Jeff Sessions is defending it. Further, immigrants seeking asylum at ports of entry are routinely turned away because of the volume of people doing so.
Oddly, the same day as Jones' article appeared, an article by Melanie Arter reporting on other Nielsen statements referenced Trump's "zero-tolerance policy" as, you know, an actual policy. Even then, Arter gave Nielsen a pass on misleading rhetoric, uncritically repeating her claim that "the Obama administration, the Bush administration all separated families" at the border.
In fact, while some families were separated, the Bush and Obama administrations had no blanket policy mandating family separation, as the current Trump zero-tolerance policy does.
