Trump reverses his border policy
President signs order to stop separating children from parents
WASHINGTON — Bowing to pressure from anxious allies, President Donald Trump abruptly reversed himself Wednesday and signed an executive order halting his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents when they are detained illegally crossing the U.S. border.
It was a dramatic turnaround for Trump, who has been insisting, wrongly, that his administration had no choice but to separate families apprehended at the border because of federal law and a court decision.
The order does not end the “zerotolerance” policy that criminally prosecutes all adults caught crossing the border illegally. But it would keep families together while they are in custody, expedite their cases and ask the Defense Department to help house them. It doesn’t appear to change anything for some 2,300 children taken from their families since the policy was put into place.
The news in recent days has been dominated by searing images of children held in cages at border facilities, as well as Trump’s harsh rhetoric on immigrants NEWS PG 9
audio recordings of young children crying for their parents — images that have sparked fury and questions of morality and concern from Republicans about a negative impact on their races in November’s midterm elections.
Until Wednesday, the president, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other officials had repeatedly argued that the only way to end the practice was for Congress to pass new legislation, while Democrats said Trump could do it with his signature alone. That’s just what he did.
“We’re going to have strong, very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the families together,” Trump said just before signing the executive order in the Oval Office. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.”
Only days ago, Trump had insisted, “You can’t do it through an executive order.”
Amid mounting backlash, however, during a meeting with Republican senators and House members earlier Wednesday, he announced his intention to sign just such an order.
“We still have to maintain toughness or our country will be overrun by people, by crime, by all of the things that we don’t stand for and that we don’t want,” the president said to reporters at that meeting. “If you’re weak, you’re pathetically weak, your country’s going to be overrun with people,” Trump said. Scoffing that some equate being strong with having no heart, he added, “I’d rather be strong.”
Under a previous class-action settlement that set policies for the treatment and release of minors caught at the border, families can only be detained for 20 days. A senior Justice Department official said that hasn’t changed. “This is a stopgap measure,” said Gene Hamilton, counsel to the attorney general. Justice lawyers were planning to file a challenge to the agreement, known as the Flores settlement, asking that a judge allow for the detention of families until criminal and removal proceedings are completed.
So Trump’s order could create a fresh set of problems and may well spark a new court fight. It’s unclear what happens if no changes to law or the settlement take place by the time families reach the detainment deadline. The language also leaves room to separate children from parents if it’s best for the child’s welfare.
And it didn’t do much for the teeming outrage over the issue. The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center said the order didn’t go nearly far enough. “The administration still plans to criminalize families — including children — by holding them in prison-like detention facilities. There are workable alternatives,” president Richard Cohen said in a statement.
Democrats in Congress gave the president no credit for reversing his own policy, and objected to the ramifications of his order. “Make no mistake: The President is doubling down on his ‘zero tolerance’ policy,” Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said in a statement. “His new Executive Order criminalizes asylum-seekers and seeks to indefinitely detain their children. Locking up whole families is no solution at all.”
It’s also unclear what will happen to the children already separated. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said his department will start reuniting detained immigrant children with their parents — but he made no specific commitment on how quickly that can be accomplished.
Trump’s reversal on the family separation policy announced in Maywas remarkable given his aversion to admit error or back down. That reflected the White House’s desperation to quash one of its worst crises to date — one that drew condemnation from across the nation’s political spectrum, including notably all four living former first ladies and conservative and liberal religious Barbara Stanton holds up cut-out dolls symbolic of children during a protest at the Baltimore ICE office against Trump administration border policies. The protest continued around the corner onto Lombard Street where Stanton was standing. Beth Skinner of Baltimore lies in the street during the protest at the Baltimore Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. leaders.
Yet Trump risked angering the most anti-immigrant elements of his base, after he’d been claiming that family separation was an essential part of a tough immigration agenda to end what he calls his predecessors’ lax border enforcement and prevent children from being used as “keep out of jail free” cards by child smugglers and other criminals.
Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, and those on the fence over pending immigration legislation headed to the White House to meet with Trump. Assessments for possible detention facilities at military bases have already been done in Texas, and another is expected in Arkansas today.
Two people close to Nielsen said she was the driving force behind the turnabout that led to the new order keeping families together. Those people were not authorized to speak publicly and commented only on condition of anonymity. One of them said Nielsen, who had become the face of the administration’s policy, had little faith that Congress would act to fix the separation issue and felt compelled to act. She was heckled at a restaurant Tuesday evening and has faced protesters at her home.
Trump had tweeted early Wednesday, before issuing his order: “It’s the Democrats fault, they won’t give us the votes needed to pass good immigration legislation. They want open borders, which breeds horrible crime. Republicans want security. But I am working on something - it never ends!”
The administration has argued that the 1997 Flores settlement forced it to lock up children separately from their parents. Past administrations mostly avoided that by President Donald Trump signs his executive order reversing the administration’s policy of separating children from immigrant parents. releasing parents with their children pending civil hearings and by not pursuing criminal prosecutions or civil deportation actions, as the Trump administration had begun doing.
The Flores settlement, named for a teenage girl who brought the case in the 1980s, requires the government to release children from custody and to their parents, adult relatives or other caretakers, in order of preference. If those options are exhausted, authorities must find the “least restrictive” setting for a child who arrived without parents. In 2015, a federal judge in Los Angeles expanded the terms of the settlement, ruling that it also applies to children who are caught with their parents as well as to those who come to the U.S. alone.
Some lawmakers who had been hopeful that the pressure created by the outcry would force agreement on a long-sought, comprehensive immigration compromise expressed frustration that the president is acting on his own. Trump, too, had intended to use the demands for action against family separations as leverage to get Congress to pass his proposed immigration limits and funding for a border wall.