Border Patrol Under Obama Used Tear Gas At Least Once a Month

Updated:

The Obama administration’s Border Patrol used tear gas along the border at least once a month – but it’s unlikely you ever heard about it.

President Trump is taking heat after tear gas was deployed at the San Ysidro point of entry when the migrant caravan attempted to breach the U.S. border and attacked Border Patrol agents with rocks and projectiles.

Leftwing pundits, politicians, and commentators immediately began likening tear gas to foreign governments using lethal chemical weapons to gas their own citizens to death.

Do they even believe what they’re saying?

Barack Obama’s Border Patrol used tear gas more than once a month

It’s not exactly uncommon for law enforcement to use tear gas, so it’s unclear what was exactly so surprising about using it to fend off an attempted violent invasion. Not only does law enforcement regularly deploy tear gas, so did those in immigration enforcement under the Obama administration no fewer than once a month during some years.

According to the Washington Times:

“The same tear-gas agent that the Trump administration is taking heat for deploying against a border mob this weekend is actually used fairly frequently — including more than once a month during the later years of President Barack Obama’s administration, according to Homeland Security data. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has used 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, or CS, since 2010, and deployed it 26 times in fiscal 2012 and 27 times in 2013. The use dropped after that, but was still deployed three times in 2016, Mr. Obama’s final full year in office.”

Obama’s border patrol also regularly deployed pepper spray – 151 times in 2013 alone – compared to 43 occurrences under Trump in 2018.

Trump takes blame while Obama received a free pass

The use of tear gas at the border is hardly the first time the media pretended that the continuation of old policies are sinister new creations of the Trump administration.

Earlier in the year we were inundated with stories of the Trump administration “separating families at the border” and “putting children in cages.” In one classic case, a handful of pundits, including Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, Shaun King, New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, Women’s March founder Linda Sarsour, and hundreds of others all shared the same article from “Arizona Central” showing pictures of children in cages.

Incredibly, not a single one actually read the text of the article, which was published a year before Trump even declared his presidential campaign.

It just goes to prove how much of the media narrative is shaped by propaganda. Leftists were quick to delete their tweets when they realize they were accidentally exposing the Obama administration‘s policies, not Trump’s. But if they truly care about those children, why should the administration matter?

And did anyone realize that Hillary Clinton’s position on immigrant children at the border was more-or-less the same as Trump’s? “We have to send a clear message, just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay,” Hillary said during a CNN townhall in 2014.

Not only that – Obama had more migrant children in custody than Trump at his peak! According to Newsweek, the Department of Health and Human Services said that there were as many as 10,852 children in their custody at the end of May (when this was a hot topic in the news). Meanwhile, in 2013, Obama’s HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement had 25,000 unaccompanied minors in their care.

Sadly, the pundit class is more concerned with smearing Republicans than the truth – but what else is new?

By Matt

Matt is the co-founder of Unbiased America and a freelance writer specializing in economics and politics. He’s been published... More about Matt

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