On Thursday morning, Fox News again displayed the kind of good journalism that is so often lacking on the more liberal networks, as Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade asked former Barack Obama administration DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson about the cage-like structures that his administration built to hold illegal immigrants, including children.
Johnson defended the facilities as being necessary to detain a large number of illegals quickly while keeping children and young women safe from adult detainees who were not related to them.
By contrast, the rest of the media typically allows Democrats to parrot the "kids in cages" mantra to attack the Donald Trump administration without informing their viewers that Obama not only did it, too, but was even the one who started it, and for good reasons.
Kilmeade picked up on former Vice President Joe Biden's recent interview with Univision's Jorge Ramos, who challenged Biden on the detention of children in the facilities he likened to cages. The Fox News host then turned to Johnson and posed: "Held up the picture from your era, and it said there was a young boy, and the divider there could look like a cage. It was bars. So he was caught by surprise. Would you be, if he held that up for you?"
The former Obama administration official recalled the construction of the cage-like facilities and defended their use for the safety of the detainees, especially children:
JEH JOHNSON, FORMER OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DHS SECRETARY: Well, look, any time you have a surge in the number of people crossing our Southern border -- men, women children -- the existing infrastructure can't handle it, and so the solutions are not pretty. And so very often when we have a surge of kids, we'd have to go out and find a very large space like a warehouse, and you have to partition the young men from the young women -- the kids from the unrelated adults with chain-linked partitions which some people would call cages.
Fox News contributor Tom Homan -- who has decades of experience enforcing immigration laws -- has also previously recalled that it was the Obama administration that built the cage-like facilities that liberals often blame on President Trump.
Below is a longer transcript of the relevant exchange between Kilmeade and Johnson from the Thursday, February 20, Fox & Friends:
BRIAN KILMEADE: The former Vice President of the United States sat down with Jorge Ramos, and he was talking about his record and your record when it came to deportations and cracking down at the border. And here's what Joe Biden's response was to Jorge Ramos. Let's listen.
FORMER VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: All the unaccompanied children were coming across the border, we tried to get them out. We kept them safe -- we get them out of the detention centers.
BIDEN CLIP #2: They were run by Homeland Security. And get them into communities as quickly as we can.
JORGE RAMOS: People would say they were cages.
BIDEN: Well, look, you know you're not telling the truth here about comparison of the two things.
KILMEADE: Held up the picture from your era, and it said there was a young boy, and the divider there could look like a cage. It was bars. So he was caught by surprise. Would you be if he held that up for you?
JEH JOHNSON, FORMER OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DHS SECRETARY: Well, look, any time you have a surge in the number of people crossing our Southern border -- men, women children -- the existing infrastructure can't handle it, and so the solutions are not pretty. And so very often when we have a surge of kids, we'd have to go out and find a very large space like a warehouse, and you have to partition the young men from the young women -- the kids from the unrelated adults with chain-linked partitions which some people would call cages.
It is not pretty, but there's also -- DHS has a legal obligation to transfer the kids to HHS within 48 hours, but, within that 48-hour period, we have to hold them until HHS could take them,
KILMEADE: Right, and that's the same challenge that any administration would have to deal with.
JOHNSON: Correct.
