‘Who put the kids in cages, Joe?’ Biden admits to ‘mistakes’ as Trump goes after Obama-era immigration policies

Democratic nominee Joe Biden was put on his heels after attacking President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, forced to acknowledge that former president Barack Obama’s detention of children at the border was a “mistake.”

Biden took aim at Trump’s policies toward migrants during Thursday’s presidential debate, slamming the administration for separating children from their parents at the border, which he said made the US a “laughing stock” around the world and violated “every notion of who we are as a nation.”

Trump argued that migrant children are often brought into the country illegally by “bad people” and “cartels,” pivoting to border policies enacted by the Obama administration, under which Biden served as vice president, including the detention of children in “cages.”

“They used to say I built the cages. They had a picture in a certain newspaper... of these horrible cages. They used to say: ‘Look at these cages, President Trump built them,’” he said, adding: “Then it was determined they were built in 2014 – that was him,” pointing at Biden across the stage.

He had eight years to do what he said he was going to do. We got rid of catch-and-release, we got rid of a lot of horrible things that they put in and that they lived with… He did nothing except build cages to keep children in.

Moderator Kristen Welker then weighed in, asking Biden to explain why the previous administration failed to implement immigration reform while overseeing record deportations and the detention of families, policies the Democratic nominee has himself blasted under Trump.

“We made a mistake, it took too long to get it right,” Biden answered. “I’ll be president of the United States, not vice president of the United States.”

As part of his very own immigration system overhaul, Biden vowed to create a “pathway to citizenship” for over 11 million undocumented immigrants within the first 100 days of his presidency, also saying he would “immediately” certify migrant children to reside in the country legally.

Some netizens called out Biden for throwing his ex-boss “under the bus” with his insistence that he was not president at the time when the ill-conceived migrant policy was introduced, but merely a VP. That is despite the former president having campaigned for Biden as recently as this week, even hosting a rally.

Supporters came to Biden’s defense, however, seeing his remarks as a sincere mea culpa for previous mistakes and as “brutally honest,” things they insisted one would never hear from the current president.

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