Obama administration officials are rushing to explain photos from 2014 that went viral this weekend showing locked-up immigrant children

Associated Press/Ross D. Franklin

In this June 18, 2014 photo, two female detainees sleep in a holding cell, as the children are separated by age group and gender, at a US Customs and Border Protection center in Nogales, Arizona.

• Several 2014 photos of detained immigrant children resurfaced on Twitter over the weekend and went viral.
• Former Obama administration officials tried to explain the context behind the photos, which appeared to show migrant kids locked up in cages.
• The former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau had shared the images on Twitter, mistakenly believing they were taken during Donald Trump's presidency.
• The former officials doubled down on their criticisms of Trump's immigration policies, and said the 2014 photos showed unaccompanied children the government had been attempting to place with family members.

Several former Obama administration officials took to social media and news outlets on Tuesday to explain a gallery of years-old photos that showed immigrant children sleeping in shoddy conditions at a government-run holding facility in Arizona.

The images, which were first published by the Associated Press in 2014, resurfaced over the weekend for reasons that remain unclear, and quickly prompted viral outrage on Twitter. One particularly disturbing image showed two children sleeping on mattresses on the floor inside what appeared to be a cage.

A number of prominent liberals - and even a former Obama administration official - shared the photos in outrage, mistakenly believing they depicted the Trump administration's treatment of immigrant children who were forcibly separated from their parents.

Jon Favreau, who worked as a speechwriter for former President Barack Obama, tweeted, "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."

Associated Press/Ross D. Franklin

Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children were being processed and held at the CBP Nogales Placement Center on June 18, 2014.

Favreau said Tuesday he later deleted the tweet after social media users pointed out that the photos were taken during the Obama administration. But by that point, critics had already rushed to accuse him of concealing Obama's own harsh immigration tactics while condemning Trump's.

Favreau said in a series of tweets that he made a "mistake" by not checking the date of the photos before sharing them on Twitter. He explained that the photos were taken in 2014, when the Obama administration faced "an influx of unaccompanied minors who showed up at the border, fleeing violence from Central America."

He added that the pictures had been taken while the government was trying to "move those children out of those shelters as fast as humanly possible and connect them with their parents, most of whom were already in the United States."

Associated Press/Ross D. Franklin

Young boys sleep in a holding cell at the Nogales Placement Center on June 18, 2014.

Another former Obama official, Cecilia Muñoz, who served as the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, offered a similar explanation to NPR on Tuesday.

"In 2014, we saw an enormous spike compared to what usually happens every year, in the number of kids crossing alone into the United States," she said. "And we didn't have enough shelter facilities, because we had a huge increase, so kids ended up piling up in Border Patrol lock-ups, which are no places for children."

She continued:

"What the Obama administration did, which is what the law requires, is to find shelter facilities for those kids, which were put together by the Department of Health and Human Services. So the goal was to get kids out of the Border Patrol, into proper care by HHS, and then HHS is supposed to release them to the least restrictive setting, and in more than 80% of the cases, that was their parents who were already in the United States."

Associated Press/Ross D. Franklin

Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell at the Nogales Placement Center on June 18, 2014.

Trump's administration does have a new policy to separate children from their parents

Both Favreau and Muñoz argued that the Trump administration's policy of separating families at the border is different from the Obama administration's handling of unaccompanied children.

"This policy is new, cruel, and unprecedented," Favreau tweeted. "It was not an Obama policy. It was not a Bush policy. It was not a Clinton policy. That is a fact. And that is what all of us - Democrats and Republicans - should want changed as soon as humanly possible."

The firestorm over the photos came amid several other immigration-related controversies that erupted over the weekend. Outrage has been growing for several weeks against the Trump administration's newly announced policy of criminally prosecuting people who illegally cross the border and separating them from their children.

Anger over the issue reached a boiling point last week, when another old piece of news - this time from April 26 - resurfaced, prompting Trump critics to assail the government for losing track of 1,475 immigrant children.

But both the Trump administration and immigration advocates have sought to tamp down concerns about those children, many of whom may have deliberately chosen not to tell the federal government where they are.