CONDEMNATION RISING
A speech by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday in New Orleans drew protesters angry about the detention of migrant children on the Mexican border.
Hundreds of children are being held at a converted former Walmart store in Texas.
Speaking at the White House on Monday, the U.S. president said, “The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. You look at what’s happening in Europe, and in other places, we cannot allow that to happen. Not on my watch.”
He said criminals were using children like a “Trojan horse” to get into America, that “a country without borders is not a country at all,” and that people coming in were bringing “death and destruction.” He added: “They are thieves and murderers and so much else.”
Criticizing the more open immigration policies of his European NATO allies, Trump wrote on Twitter: “Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!” He specifically mentioned Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, claiming “crime in Germany is way up” and immigration was why “the people of Germany are turning against their leadership.”
Trump went on to attack Democrats in Congress, blaming them for the separation of families at the border because they had created “horrible laws” and had been “weak and ineffective”.
There is no law requiring children to be taken from parents apprehended after unlawfully crossing the border.
In April, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, introduced a “zero-tolerance” policy that meant all adults caught crossing the border illegally were to be detained and prosecuted — as opposed to being released while they await proceedings. Their children are then removed and held in separate facilities.
Trump has been very critical of what he called the “catch and release” policy.
Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, speaking at the National Sheriffs’ Association, said releasing parents with their children would be a “get out of jail free card.” She said the administration wouldn’t apologize for splitting apart families at the border.
Nielsen suggested that some immigrants illegally entering the U.S. with children were not in fact families, and that those seeking asylum should go to official ports of entry instead of crossing the border unlawfully.
“We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are in fact a family. We have to do our job; we will not apologize for doing our job.”
Sessions, speaking at the same meeting in New Orleans, said if a border wall was built then “we won’t face these terrible choices.”
But Laura Bush, the former first lady, said the separation of families was “cruel, immoral and breaks my heart.” She compared it to the “shameful” internment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War.
A senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services said up to 30,000 illegal immigrant children could be held by the end of August, and it was “running out of space.”