BY FAR HIS GREATEST SIN THOUGH...:

 In 2018, as the horror of the Trump administration's family separation policies became clear and images emerged showing children in cages, covered with tin foil emergency blankets, Pod Save America host and former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau sounded the alarm. 

"Look at these pictures," Favreau Tweeted, linking to photos of children lying face down behind chain link fencing. "This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible."

However, those pictures were from 2014, not 2018, and showed the treatment of migrant children under Obama, not Trump -- a fact pointed out to Favreau who then, in an act of unimpeachable courage, deleted the Tweet.

Attempts to ignore or sweep away the Obama administration's culpability in the current immigration crisis continue. In August, during the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama declared that Americans "watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages," sidestepping completely who it was that built the cages in the first place.

And who built them is only an issue if you acknowledge their prior existence at all. Kelly Scaletta, a sportswriter who occasionally writes about politics, recently claimed on Twitter that the cages the Obama administration used were not cages at all, but rather that administration immigration officials "chose to use chain-link to separate the groups because it was better for ventilation." One wonders what Scaletta would call a cage if not this.

Obama's been working to rewrite the past as well. In an interview with popular radio show Breakfast Club, the former president faulted evangelical Hispanic voters for prioritizing social issues over Trump's racist comments or, in a breathtakingly cynicla comment, "puts detainees, undocumented workers in cages."

This refusal to acknowledge the past is dangerous and has real-world consequences. On Friday, Cecilia Muñoz, domestic policy director in Obama's White House and an immigration policy advisor, joined Joe Biden's transition team. The former Obama official's appointment was met with resistance from the left, who pointed to her comments in 2011 defending the Obama administration's policies of family separation as indicative of how things will not substantively change for children on the border under a Biden administration. 

"As long as Congress gives us the money to deport 400,000 people a year, that's what the administration is going to do," Muñoz added. "That's our obligation under the law." 

But just because one can do something doesn't mean one should. Immigrant rights activists and the Democratic Party's progressive wing have long rejected that excuse for mass deportations and the practice was and remains a major hurdle in the relationship between the former president and the left  wing of his party.

While Muñoz in strict terms only defended the Obama administration's enactment of immigration policy, her appointment gets at a broader theme that's rearing its head as Biden prepares to take office: that the treatment of immigrants by the Obama administration has been completely relegated to the black hole of public imagination. 

But Trump's existence does not excuse the Obama administration's intensely hostile treatment of the undocumented. Successes like DACA do not erase the cages that were built, the atrocities against children in detention, and the policy positioning that opened the door to Trump's revving up of the existing cruelty in the system. 

"Most every horrific measure taken by Trump has a policy precedent in similar, if less breathtakingly inhumane, actions taken by his establishment predecessors," Daniel Denvir wrote for Jacobin in June 2018, "predecessors who, alongside the nativist right and their mouthpieces on Fox News and talk radio, helped move the conservative Overton Window on immigration so far to the right that by November 2016 it perfectly framed Donald Trump."

Fair or not, today Muñoz is bearing the brunt of this criticism. But the real concern is that liberals are fighting against the accountability of historical memory on this topic with this administration in such a way that will erase any chance of a fair and honest accounting of the culpability of the 21st century's first Democratic president. 

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