Under the Obama administration, families were not separated because the parents were not jailed. The photos to which you refer pertain to unaccompanied minors.

What is happening now is that the Trump administration is jailing parents and removing children from their custody; in some instances, deporting the parents back to Central American without their own children.

This is explicitely a discretionary change in policy ordered by Sessions and the Trump administration. The Obama adminstration did not have a policy of separating children from their families.

Seems like you're 100% wrong on that.

The only reason it seems like it didn't stick is because congressional Republicans and the conservative media benefit protecting Trump.

There is an important legal distinction which determines whether or not you're arrested and separated from your family: asylum seeker vs criminal migrant.

If you walk up to the border patrol checkpoint and request asylum you will not be separated from your family. Once we make sure you're not a known criminal we basically let you go and put you in the queue for the asylum process.

Conversely, if you attempt to cross the border between checkpoints you are generally an economically motivated undocumented migrant. In this case, if we catch you the first time we'll essentially let you go home with a warning. The second time you do this it's a felony and you go down the felony/criminal process path. If you go down that path you are under arrest, and if you're under arrest in the United States we don't put your kids in jail with you. Children are remanded to the HHS who will either place the children with extended family, in foster care, or other things like that.

So what happened and what's changed? If you're an economically motivated migrant the best outcome is you scoot across the border undetected. The second best outcome is you get asylum status (has restrictions like you can't work). The worst outcome is you go to jail. People began gaming the system, attempting to cross the border illegally and when caught would claim to be asylum seekers. The policy difference between Obama and Trump is that Obama's administration was basically more likely to let you get away with going on the asylum track even if you'd tried to cross the border illegally.

So as it stands today ICE (if Trump ordered it) could go back to the Obama policy of granting people who cross illegally and then claim asylum status only after they've been caught. This would greatly increase the number of people on the asylum track (no separation) and decrease the number of people on the criminal track (separation). Or I guess technically Trump could order ICE not arrest anyone crossing the border illegally. You give them a court date, release them to the public, and hope they show up. The concern here is the incentives. However, without a change to the law, ICE has no choice but to separate the families when you get arrested.

The case law in question is the 1997 Flores settlement, a class action lawsuit which resulted in essentially saying ICE had to release the children since they are not being charged with a crime.

https://eu.freep.com/story/news/2018/05/17/troy-cile-preceta...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/migrant-seeking-asylum-say...

- families presenting themselves at the border are being separated

- the vast majority of families being separated under this policy are first time arrivals, because what Trump has done is order prosecution of ALL arrivals

- international law says you can claim asylum after having arrived without a visa, it does not make you a criminal to do so

- under Obama, families doing so were actually released into community detention and almost universally did show up to their immigration court dates. Trump ended this program, in favor of jailing them all separately. That, just like instructing ICE to arrest and charge first time arrivals, is a policy decision and requires no change in the law for them to go back to the previous system.

Citations for all these: https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/immigrants-right...

If they want to enforce the border they will need to put in place a less inhuman/bad looking system. In the past presumably the way round this was to not enforce the legislation - let people in?

Can you cite the law he's required to enforce here?

Not only is everyone going along with the new narrative, they're confident that Trump supporters are the ones who are too blind to see that today's talking point contradicts the previous talking point.