We don’t want to be like EU says Trump – as even his wife blasts US child migrant centres
DONALD Trump last night launched an extraordinary attack on Angela Merkel’s immigration policy as he tried to defend his controversial child detention centres at the US-Mexico border.
As condemnation of his policy that separates children from their parents intensified, with even his wife criticising him, Mr Trump took aim at the fragile German coalition government.
In blistering Twitter messages, the President falsely suggested an influx of migrants had caused a spike in crime.
He wrote: ‘The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up.’
‘We don’t want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!’
German media was quick to rubbish Mr Trump’s claims that migration had caused a rise in crime – pointing to official figures released last month that showed offences in Germany at the lowest level since 1992.
His comments came as his decision to separate undocumented migrant parents from their children at the Mexican border was met with dismay.
More than 2,300 children were split up from their families over a six-week period in April and May after the White House announced a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy.
It means that, unlike under previous administrations, illegal immigrants are being prosecuted as criminals.
This has led to parents being separated from their children and sent to federal prisons. The children, who are not charged with a crime, are being housed in detention centres, including warehouses and converted supermarkets.
Pictures yesterday emerged of children in 50ft by 50ft metal cages at a detention centre in Texas.
In a highly unusual statement, Melania Trump said it was wrong that 45 children a day were being separated from their mothers and fathers.
The First Lady’s spokesman said she believes ‘we need to be a country that follows all laws,’ but also ‘governs with heart’. The spokesman added: ‘ Mrs Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform.’
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said Mr Trump’s widely claims that the family separations were mandated by law was ‘an outright lie’.
Former First Lady Laura Bush – wife of George W Bush – wrote a scathing article for the Washington Post newspaper, saying the policy was ‘cruel, immoral and it breaks my heart’.
She added: ‘ These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II... one of the most shameful episodes in US history.’
But a defiant Mr Trump said last night: ‘The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility, it won’t be. You look at what’s happening in Europe, you look at what’s happening in other places, we can’t allow that to happen to the United States – not on my watch.’
At a 77,000 sq ft camp in McAllen, Texas, lights are on 24 hours a day to monitor the 1,129 migrants including 200 children.
The facility is called Ursula but migrants reportedly call it La Perrera, Spanish for dog kennel. UN human rights high commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said: ‘The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting abuse on children is unconscionable.’
Republican senator Susan Collins called it ‘inconsistent with our American values’. Ex-White House communications chief Anthony Scaramucci said it was ‘not the Christian way’. Last week Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA, Tweeted a picture of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau on Twitter and wrote: ‘Other governments have separated mothers from their children’.
Speaking on CNN Mr Hayden said: ‘I know we’re not Nazi Germany, but there is a commonality and a fear there on my part and we have standards we have to live to.
‘Let’s run the clock back to 1933, which is really what I was trying to address.
‘And in 1933, what did we see in Germany? A cult of personality, a cult of nationalism, a cult of grievance, a press operation that looked like and was the ministry of propaganda and then the punishing of marginalised groups’.
‘We can’t allow that to happen’