Obama speaks out on family separations: Imagine your child was ripped from your arms

Former president Barack Obama broke his silence on Wednesday — World Refugee Day — on immigrant families who have forced to be separated when entering the country at the southern border.

He encouraged those across the United States to imagine themselves in the shoes of these families who are trying to seek a safe haven inside the country, and left a simple, but pointed question: "Are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms, or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together?"

Obama has been the one of the primary targets of blame from Republicans for the crisis that exploded last week after it was announced about 2,000 children had been separated from adults as part of the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy.

The policies of separating children from adults who are being prosecuted were in place during the Obama administration and date back to former president George W. Bush. But the implementation of "zero tolerance" by the Trump administration has led to more prosecutions and, thus, more separations.

Trump has blamed previous administrations and Democrats for not fixing immigration loopholes and the history of using "catch and release" to deal with these individuals and families.

"If you've been fortunate enough to have been born in America, imagine for a moment if circumstance had placed you somewhere else," Obama wrote Wednesday on his Facebook page.

He continued: "Imagine if you'd been born in a country where you grew up fearing for your life, and eventually the lives of your children. A place where you finally found yourself so desperate to flee persecution, violence, and suffering that you'd be willing to travel thousands of miles under cover of darkness, enduring dangerous conditions, propelled forward by that very human impulse to create for our kids a better life."

He wrote that the balance of laws and humanity is part of what makes us all Americans because of the belief that all humans "are created equal, and all of us deserve the chance to become something better."

"But we have to do more than say 'this isn’t who we are," Obama wrote. "We have to prove it – through our policies, our laws, our actions, and our votes."

Several hours after Obama's post — and after days of a national outcry about these immigrant children — Trump signed an executive order designed to keep migrant families together, abandoning his earlier claim that the crisis was caused by an iron-clad law and not a policy that he could reverse.

WPXI