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Democratic presidential candidates have mostly been able to avoid a substantive discussion of what immigration policy should look like. Expressing outrage over President Donald Trump’s policies has sufficed for debate soundbites. That might be politically expedient; immigration is one of the top issues on voters’ minds, but also one of the most divisive. Being vague is a way to put off alienating various wings of the party until the primaries are over. (Narea, 9/12)

Castro, who served alongside Biden in the Obama administration as the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, gave a nod not only to Trump’s shortcomings on immigration but also on the Obama administration’s. He highlighted his own plan, one of the boldest in the Democratic field and that is also deeply contrasted with Obama’s. As Vox’s Nicole Narea explained, Obama deported over 3 million immigrants from 2009 and 2016. ... Obama set up temporary housing not all that different from the shelter the Trump administration has at the border amid its own migrant crisis in 2014 and struggled to strike a balance between humanitarian efforts and enforcement. (Stewart, 9/13)

“We didn’t lock people up in cages; we didn’t separate families.”— Former vice president Joe Biden. Contrary to Biden’s claim, the Obama administration did use caged enclosures beginning in 2014 to hold families apprehended along the southern border by U.S. authorities. There is photographic evidence showing the cages in 2014. (Kessler, Rizzo and Kelly, 9/12)

Democrats routinely accuse Trump of using cages for children without acknowledging the same enclosures were employed when Biden was vice president. The Obama administration also separated migrant children from families under certain limited circumstances, like when the child's safety appeared at risk or when the parent had a serious criminal history. But family separations as a matter of routine came about because of President Donald Trump's "zero tolerance" enforcement policy last year. (9/12)