On Sunday afternoon, MSNBC displayed the latest in a very small number of times when the dominant liberal media have admitted that the treatment of illegal immigrants in detention under the Trump administration has been very similar to what it was under the Obama administration in spite of the media treating the detention centers as if they were something President Donald Trump invented.
At 3:45 p.m. Eastern, as NPR's Maria Hinojosa appeared as a guest, MSNBC Live host David Gura referred to his guest's experience at covering immigrant detention as he posed:
We are getting a better sense here of what life was like in those shelters. This is something you've been looking at for a very long time. There have been allegations of abuse -- of children having to do chores under duress and difficulties within these centers. How in keeping is that with what you saw before this particular unfolding so publicly?
Hinojosa recalled that she monitored criticisms of immigrant detention centers between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations as she began:
I was doing this reporting through 2010, so it was in the leadup under the George W. Bush administration and then kind of went on steroids under the Obama administration. The abuse has been there -- the abuse continues to be there. These detention facilities continue to get fabulous audits from the people who are coming in to see whether or not they're being professional.
She added:
So the places where I have been where there has been rampant charges of sexual assault against women -- often times by women guards against women -- and then they're just -- their contracts get renewed. So there is -- I guess, for me, when I think about this, I'm like, 'Oh, my God, we've been talking about sexual assault -- we've been talking about the fact that children are put into perreras -- cages -- they're put into places that are called hieleras -- ice boxes -- that we know that women have been sexually assaulted -- that men have been taken out back and beaten -- that children are put to work and told not to cry.
The liberal NPR correspondent concluded by asserting that the main "difference" now is that "people finally are paying attention." Here's more from Hinojosa:
This has been happening for the longest time. The difference now is that, because of these policies, people finally are paying attention, but it's not just about these 2,000 kids, it's about the tens of thousands of families that have been ripped apart.
For the record, Hinojosa made similar charges on MSNBC a few weeks ago.
