Calm Down, There Was No "Prison Bus for Babies" Used by Immigration Authorities

Over the weekend you may have seen this tweet by Antonio Arellano, a reporter for ABC 13 in Houston.

As you can see, the tweet had nearly 20,000 retweets. By twits like this:

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Until it disappeared. Why did that happen? Most likely because it was exposed as a blatant fraud. This is the link in the tweet. When you follow it you find:

The expansion of the Karnes County Residential Center (KCRC) was completed in early December 2015 and increased the capacity to 1,158 beds.

The expansion created new demands to an already unique transportation mission by requiring larger capacity vehicles to provide offsite field trips. These field trips are part of the contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Field trips are provided to all children, ages four through seventeen enrolled in educational programs provided by the John H. Wood Charter School, located at KCRC. Field trips consist of going to a variety of places, such as the San Antonio Zoo, seeing a movie at the local theater, going to the park, etc.

At every loading, children are assisted into the safety seat systems either by a nurse, a teacher, or case manager, and secured into the harness system. Once this is done, the GTI drivers check each child to ensure correct application and fit to the harness system. The GTI drivers have all received specialized training and are certified child restraint seat installers. All other passengers not required to be in a safety seat, are also checked for seat belt systems being latched and secure.

For every offsite trip of this nature, an operational plan is developed and submitted to ICE for review and approval. Each trip, and vehicle, requires a minimum of one nurse, two teachers and one case manager. For control and security, GTI staff seat all adult chaperones evenly dispersed throughout the cabin to maintain order and safety of the children during transit.

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Yes, it is a bus for carrying young kids. Yes, it is at an ICE detention facility. But at that point, any similarity between this and a “prison bus for babies” ends.

All you can call the effort by Arellano and the people who retweeted his lie is deliberate misinformation designed to inflame the public against the very idea of border security. What is unexpected is that so many people on the right picked up this same tweet and spread it as a way to hurt President Trump without doing the due diligence of simply clicking the link in the tweet.

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