Phil Bredesen Accused President Trump of ‘Child Abuse’ on Border Despite Flawed Media Coverage of True Situation

While the controversy of separating families crossing the U.S. border illegally has been mostly settled, it’s worth noting that Democrat Senate Candidate Phil Bredesen took his criticism of President Trump on the issue as far as any far Left-Wing agitator did, in effect, labeling it child abuse.

That despite it becoming increasingly apparent that media coverage of the issue was slanted, at best, as the Knoxville News Sentinel reported:

Before he spoke about rising health care costs, before he listened to the stories of gaps in the system and before he visited the wing dedicated to babies born dependent on opiates, Phil Bredesen spoke Wednesday about the “elephant in the room.”

Bredesen said it was wrong for the U.S. government to institute a policy that separated children from families at the U.S.-Mexican border and he said the policy was “effectively child abuse.”

He said he hoped President Donald Trump would fix the crisis Tuesday, which he did later in the day.

It’s also worth noting that it’s now obvious that some of the media’s coverage of the issue varied from somewhere between dishonest and incompetent, as Fox News reported in this story, “Crying migrant girl on TIME magazine cover was not separated from mother, family says.”:

A little girl shown in a viral photo crying as a U.S. Border Patrol agent detained her mother – and used by TIME magazine to symbolize the Trump administration’s family separation policy – reportedly was never separated from her mom.

“Welcome to America,” declared a somber TIME cover, which showed the picture of the Honduran child Yanela Sanchez next to a towering President Trump.

… But multiple outlets interviewed the father of the girl behind the iconic image, and he said he had learned that his two-year-old daughter was detained with her mother at a facility in Texas, and the two were not separated at all. The Honduran government confirmed his version of events to Reuters.

The Washington Post reported that the mother, Sandra Sanchez, had previously been deported in 2013 to Honduras. Her husband told the Post that she left without telling him she was taking Yanela with her and couldn’t contact her. But then he saw the picture on the news.
“You can imagine how I felt when I saw that photo of my daughter. It broke my heart. It’s difficult as a father to see that, but I know now that they are not in danger. They are safer now than when they were making that journey to the border,” Denis Javier Varela Hernandez told The Daily Mail.

He also said he did not support his wife’s decision to make the perilous trek to the U.S. and that they have three other children together.

Bredesen faces Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN-07)  in the November general election to replace outgoing Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN).