Every living first lady has condemned separating immigrant families

In the past 48 hours, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Rosalynn Carter all spoke out against the Trump administration’s border policy.

The issue, which is dominating national headlines, first drew a statement from the current occupant of the White House’s East Wing on Sunday afternoon, with Trump saying to CNN that she “hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform.”

At the Texas-Mexico border, her son begged not to be taken. They took him anyway.

Hours later, Bush published a full-throated op-ed for The Washington Post calling camps set up to house the children taken from their parents “eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II.”

The separation policy is “immoral,” she said.

Clinton, who often opposes President Trump, sent out a stream of tweets blasting the White House: “What’s happening to families at the border right now is a humanitarian crisis. Every parent who has ever held a child in their arms, every human being with a sense of compassion and decency, should be outraged.”

Obama joined the conversation, sharing Bush’s op-ed on her Twitter.

Carter too expressed dismay over the forced separations. “When I was first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand,” she said Monday in a statement to The Washington Post. “I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstances beyond their control. The practice and policy today of removing children from their parents’ care at our border with Mexico is disgraceful and a shame to our country.”

Jennifer Lawless, a professor of government at American University, says there’s a lot that’s unusual about such an outcry among current and former first ladies.

It’s particularly striking, she said, to see Melania Trump take such a different tone from her husband. “I can’t come up with an example of a time that a first lady’s statement comes pretty close to contravening the West Wing,” she said. “It’s incredibly rare to have two policy statements that are pretty much at odds.”

Yet, some are not reading Trump’s statement as a rebuke of her husband’s policies. Heather Higgins, the chairman of the board of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, says that the president and Melania Trump have echoed similar messages.

“There is no evidence of any difference between their positions, despite the media’s effort to manufacture a wedge and treat her as a victim without agency,” Higgins said in an e-mail.

Former first ladies, too, tend to avoid the most controversial issues, adhering to the informal practice their husbands follow of generally refraining from armchair quarterbacking.

Given the searing visuals of children being kept in cages and parents and toddlers crying, it is not surprising that the first ladies would speak out, Lawless said. Issues affecting women and children have long been the domain of a first lady’s platform.