From outrage to spin cycle.
Via BI:
Several former Obama administration officials took to social media and news outlets on Tuesday to explain a gallery of years-old photos that showed immigrant children sleeping in shoddy conditions at a government-run holding facility in Arizona.
The images, which were first published by the Associated Press in 2014, resurfaced over the weekend for reasons that remain unclear, and quickly prompted viral outrage on Twitter. One particularly disturbing image showed two children sleeping on mattresses on the floor inside what appeared to be a cage.
A number of prominent liberals — and even a former Obama administration official — shared the photos in outrage, mistakenly believing they depicted the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrant children who were forcibly separated from their parents.
Jon Favreau, who worked as a speechwriter for former President Barack Obama, tweeted, “This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.”
Favreau said Tuesday he later deleted the tweet after social media users pointed out that the photos were taken during the Obama administration. But by that point, critics had already rushed to accuse him of concealing Obama’s own harsh immigration tactics while condemning Trump’s.
Favreau said in a series of tweets that he made a “mistake” by not checking the date of the photos before sharing them on Twitter. He explained that the photos were taken in 2014, when the Obama administration faced “an influx of unaccompanied minors who showed up at the border, fleeing violence from Central America.”
He added that the pictures had been taken while the government was trying to “move those children out of those shelters as fast as humanly possible and connect them with their parents, most of whom were already in the United States.”