Trump ends migrant family separations
WASHINGTON – As a crisis of migrant children separated from their families provoked national outrage, US President Donald Trump said he was powerless to act through an executive order.
Five days later, he did just that.
The president’s abrupt aboutface laid bare the administration’s capricious use of executive power as it presses forward with a crackdown on illegal immigration, first ensnaring children in
its “zero tolerance” prosecution policy, then coming up with a “stopgap” reprieve in the face of global condemnation.
The president who had declared as a candidate that “I alone can fix” the nation’s problems in recent weeks threw up his arms and said only Congress could solve the problem of children being separated from their parents – and then reversed course once again.
What changed?
Brookings Institution senior fellow Bill Galston, a presidential scholar and a Clinton White House official, described it as “classic blame shifting” in the face of mounting bipartisan criticism and amid heartbreaking tales of toddlers kept from their parents. The president, he said, was in an “unsustainable position and would like to be bailed out of it without having to admit fault.”
White House officials, advocates and congressional leaders were blindsided Wednesday when word emerged that Trump was considering doing precisely what he’d forcefully claimed he couldn’t do – act unilaterally to quell a growing humanitarian and political crisis.
The four-page order he signed will keep together children and parents apprehended for crossing the border illegally for at least 20 days, and directs the Justice Department to fight in court to permanently remove the threat of separation.
Trump acted after encountering mushrooming blowback from Democrats, Republicans, evangelical leaders, former first ladies – even the pope. But White House officials offered little explanation for the reversal or why the president didn’t act sooner. It was a rare public step-down from the president in the face of a monumental self-imposed crisis.
“I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” Trump said.
Family separations soared after the Justice Department’s April announcement that all unlawful border crossings would be criminally prosecuted set in motion what officials
From Page 1 described alternately as a predictable chain of unintended consequences, or a deliberate effort to pressure Congress to finally enact the president’s immigration priorities.
As distressing images and audio of bereft children emerged, Trump found himself lobbied privately by his wife and eldest daughter to do more.
“The first lady has been making her opinion known to the president for some time now,” a White House official said, “which was that he needed to do all he could to help families stay together, whether it was by working with Congress or anything he could do on his own.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe her thinking.
White House spokesman Raj Shah said Ivanka Trump had phoned lawmakers on Capitol Hill to echo the president’s call to pass legislation to solve the issue completely.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who became the face of the family separations with her combative press briefing Monday, began to have second thoughts of her own. On Monday evening, she faced protesters at her home. On Tuesday, she was heckled out of a Mexican restaurant. Alumni of her Berkeley, California, high school circulated an open letter of condemnation.
Nielsen pushed the president to find a way to de-escalate the situation, said two officials, who were not authorized to describe the discussions and requested anonymity.
That came in the form of the executive order, which Justice Department lawyers had drafted in the days earlier in case the president should want that option. Wednesday morning, he ordered attorneys to get it ready for his signature.
The order stated: “It is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.”