After staying quiet on Twitter during the first night of Democratic presidential debates on CNN in Detroit, President Donald Trump went about an hour into Wednesday night's show before tweeting his take.
Trump tweeted that former President Barack Obama is responsible for the family separation policy and that his predecessor's administration built the "cages for kids" in 2014. Trump also said in the Twitter post that he ended the policy despite realizing that more families would come to the border.
In the spirit of debate fact-checking, Trump was correct that the Obama administration detained unaccompanied children at the border. WUSA verified that under Obama's administration, unaccompanied minors could be placed in a cage-like facility for up to three days.
Such minors detained at the border were held in Customs and Border Protection facilities before being transferred to temporary housing or sponsor homes.
A 2016 report from a Senate subcommittee shows the Office of Refugee Resettlement placed 90,000 migrant children with sponsors in fiscal year 2014.
But the second part of Trump's claim about child separation is misleading.
Experts say there were some child separations under previous administrations, but there was no blanket policy until Trump to prosecute parents and, as a result, separate them from their kids.
