Border Patrol apprehends illegal aliens who have just crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico near McAllen, Texas, on April 18, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Border Patrol apprehends illegal aliens who have just crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico near McAllen, Texas, on April 18, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Politics

Actress Posts Cropped Photos From Obama-Era to Blame President Trump for ‘Torture’

By Janita Kan
June 24, 2019 Updated: June 24, 2019

Actress Nancy Lee Grahn has falsely accused President Donald Trump of poor border facility conditions by posting photos that were actually taken under the Obama administration.

Grahn, who is known for her role in “General Hospital,” claims the photos were recently taken and that the Trump administration was torturing the “children.”

The photos in question, which show detainees sleeping or sitting on the floor of the facility wrapped in aluminum emergency blankets, were actually taken from 2015. But the actress had posted a version of the photo with the time and date cropped out.

“Trump administration is forcing children 2 sleep on cement floor with an aluminum blanket & lights on all night. Sarah Fabian from DOJ argued in court that it was good enough & soap was unnecessary. Companies making 750 a kid a day to torture them,” Grahn wrote in her tweet on June 21.

The post garnered a lot of attention with over 34,500 retweets and more than 38,000 likes as of June 24.

Many people were quick to call the actress out for the misleading photos.

“30,000 retweets for this total lie. These pictures are from 2015 and Nancy cropped the time stamp out of the top left. This only further proves the media took an 8 year nap under Obama,” conservative commentator Caleb Hull wrote.

“In her tweet, you can even see that she didn’t fully crop out the black box covering the beginning of the time stamp I posted above. It doesn’t get much worse than this, folks. Fake news is the enemy of the people,” he said in another post.

Similarly, the Daily Wire journalist Ryan Saavedra also called out the actress.

“The timestamps on both of these photos—both from 2015—were just magically cut off. The photos in this deceptive tweet happened under former Democrat President Barack Obama, not Trump,” he wrote.

The photos, taken in 2015, were submitted in 2016 as part of a lawsuit against Border Patrol by The American Immigration Council, the National Immigration Law Center, the ACLU of Arizona, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Morrison & Foerster LLP, according to the American Immigration Council.

Moreover, according to the lawsuit, the caption of the second photo in Grahn’s post actually depicts men wrapped in Mylar sheets.

 

On June 24, the actress dismissed the criticism by posting, “my timeline is filled with ‘tweets aren’t available’ posts because Trumpers don’t know that they were muted long ago and are continuing to rant to no one. Kinda like holding a kids head at arms length when they’re swinging at you.”

This is not the first time photos of border patrol facilities from the Obama administration were used to criticize Trump’s immigration policies.

An Associated Press photo of two unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell taken in June 2014 was widely reported by media outlets and circulated on social media to falsely represent Trump’s policies.

In response, Trump said, “Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires. Dems must agree to Wall and new Border Protection for good of country…Bipartisan Bill!”

Follow Janita on Twitter: @janitakan
RECOMMENDED
TOP VIDEOS
TOP NEWS