‘Inhumane’ policy spurs division
White House adopts plan called ‘disgraceful’ in attempt to stop migrants
WASHINGTON— Almost immediately after U.S. President Donald Trump took office, his administration began weighing what for years had been regarded as the nuclear option in the effort to discourage immigrants from unlawfully entering the United States.
Children would be separated from their parents if the families had been apprehended entering the country illegally, John Kelly, then the Homeland Security secretary, said in March 2017, “in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network.”
For more than a decade, even as illegal immigration levels fell overall, seasonal spikes in unauthorized border crossings had bedevilled U.S. presidents in both political parties, prompting them to cast about for increasingly aggressive ways to discourage migrants from making the trek.
For George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the idea of crying children torn from their parents’ arms was simply too inhumane — and too politically perilous — to embrace as policy, and Trump, although he made an immigration crackdown one of the central issues of his campaign, succumbed to the same reality, publicly dropping the idea after Kelly’s comments touched off a swift backlash.
But advocates inside the administration, most prominently Stephen Miller, Trump’s se- nior policy adviser, never gave up on the idea.
Last month, Trump ordered a new effort to criminally prosecute anyone who crossed the border unlawfully — with few exceptions for parents travelling with their minor children. And now Trump faces the consequences. With thousands of children detained in makeshift shelters, his spokesperson last week had to deny accusations the administration was acting like Nazis. Evangelical supporter Franklin Graham said its policy was “disgraceful.”
Among those who have professed objections to the policy is the president himself, who despite his clear directive to show no mercy in enforcing the law, has searched publicly for someone else to blame for dividing families.
He has falsely claimed that Democrats are responsible for the practice.
Inside the Trump administration, current and former officials say, there is considerable unease about the policy, which is regarded by some charged with carrying it out as unfeasible in practice and questionable morally. Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary, clashed privately with Trump over the practice, sometimes inviting furious lectures from the president that have pushed her to the brink of resignation.
But Miller has expressed none of the president’s misgivings. “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” he said during an interview in his West Wing office last week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. ”The administration’s critics are not buying that explanation.
“This is not a zero-tolerance policy, this is a zero-humanity policy, and we can’t let it go on,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat.
Beyond moral objections, Jeh Johnson, who as secretary of Homeland Security was the point man for Obama’s own struggles with illegal immigration, argued that deterrence, in and of itself, is neither practical nor a long-term solution to the problem.
When Central American migrants, including many unaccompanied children, began surging across the border in 2014, Obama formed a multiagency team to figure out what should be done.
“The agencies were surfacing every possible idea,” Cecilia Munoz, Obama’s top domestic policy adviser, recalled, including whether to separate parents from their children. “I do remember looking at each other like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea. The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”
They did, however, decide to vastly expand the detention of immigrant families, opening new facilities along the border where women and young children were held for long periods while they awaited a chance to have their cases processed.
It was Bush, who had firsthand experience with the border as governor of Texas and ran for president as a “compassionate conservative,” who initiated the zero-tolerance approach on which Trump’s policy is modelled.
In 2005, he launched Operation Streamline, a program along a stretch of the border in Texas that referred all unlawful entrants for criminal prosecution. The initiative yielded results and was soon expanded to more border sectors. However, exceptions were generally made for adults travelling with minor children, as well as juveniles and people who were ill.
Discussions began almost immediately after Trump took office about expanding Operation Streamline, with almost none of those limitations. Even after Kelly stopped talking publicly about family separation, the Department of Homeland Security quietly tested it last summer in certain areas in Texas.
And Miller argued that bringing back zero tolerance would be a potent tool in a severely limited arsenal of strategies for stopping migrants from flooding across the border.