Family separations spark rare bipartisan outrage
Trump digs in on zero tolerance as legislators express growing unease
WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats amped up their outrage Monday, and Republicans expressed growing unease with President Donald Trump’s policy of taking children from their parents who try to cross the border illegally.
Trump and his top advisers dug in on their controversial new “zero tolerance” policy of taking immigrant children from parents, saying it is up to Congress to fix the problem. Texas U.S. Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee and Beto O’Rourke rejected Trump’s claims after visiting detention centers along the border.
Among the high-profile GOP defections was U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, of San Antonio, whose district includes the 400-bed tent facility for immigrant youth in Tornillo, near El Paso, which has become a focal
point in the immigration battle.
“If your strategy for border security involves separating kids, then you need to rethink that strategy,” Hurd told the Houston Chronicle after touring the facility over the weekend. Hurd faces reelection in a heavily Latino district that encompasses about 800 miles of the border.
Former first lady Laura Bush also weighed in, condemning a Trump administration policy that has resulted in the forced separation of some 2,000 minors in the past six weeks, which she said was reminiscent of World War II Japanese internment camps.
“I appreciate the need to enforce and protect international boundaries, but this zero tolerance policy is cruel,” Bush wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post — taking a rare step into a national debate. “It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.”
White House officials claimed they have no choice but to enforce immigration laws that they say Democrats helped pass years ago.
“It is absolutely the law of the land,” White House spokesman Gidley Hogan told reporters outside the West Wing. “There are only two things you can do in this particular situation: You can release the entire family unit or you can separate them. That’s it.”
Democrats argued that the family separations could end with a single presidential directive, noting that the practice was not widely put into effect under Trump’s predecessors. They say the scenes of terrified children wailing in chain-link cages in Texas and elsewhere are the direct result of the “zero-tolerance” policy announced last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“There is a humanitarian crisis at our borders,” said Lee, a Houston Democrat who visited the Casa Padre detention facility for unaccompanied children Monday in Brownsville. “The Administration’s ‘zero-tolerance’ immigration policy is directly, and shamefully, responsible for ripping families apart at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat from the Rio Grande Valley, said he “didn’t see a single person smile” during a tour of a child detention center in McAllen. “It’s just a real American shame,” he said. “Separating families is not what a beacon of the world stands for.”
‘Enforcing the laws’
Trump took to Twitter on Monday to shift the focus from mass family separations to crimes committed by immigrants.
“It is the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder(sic) Security and Crime,” Trump said. “Tell them to start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration. Change the laws!”
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen echoed the president’s argument on Monday, telling reporters in a contentious White House press briefing that the current law and court rulings prevent officials from detaining families together while they undergo prosecution for illegal entry.
The Department of Homeland Security, she said, “is no longer ignoring the law. We are enforcing the laws as they exist on the books.” She added that the onus should be on Congress to change the law.
“We will not apologize for doing our job,” she said earlier in the day in a speech before the National Sheriff ’s Association meeting in New Orleans. “This administration has a simple message — if you cross the border illegally, we will prosecute you.”
Nielsen also noted that many people crossing the border as family units “are not in fact a family.” Regardless, she said, they are treated well. “Don’t believe the press,” Nielsen said. “They are very well taken care of.”
O’Rourke rejected Nielsen’s claims that the administration had no choice but to separate families. He led a Father’s Day march Sunday at the Tornillo tent camp, 35 miles from his hometown of El Paso.
“You do (have a policy),” O’Rourke shot back on Twitter. “I’ve met moms held in cells w(sic) their young kids before you take them. Seen the kids behind cyclone fences after you’ve ‘unaccompanied’ them. Been w(sic) parents prosecuted like common criminals for doing what any parent would do, through tears asking me where their kids are.”
O’Rourke is campaigning against Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who defended Trump’s policy at the state Republican Party convention over the weekend in San Antonio. Cruz suggested that the immigrants should bear the blame for putting their children in danger, even as he called the scenes of children being taken from their parents “heartbreaking.”
The state’s senior U.S. Sen., John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, has argued that the policy might serve as a deterrent to illegal immigration, though there has been little sign of a slowdown of illegal border crossing since the new policy was announced.
Cornyn said in a Senate speech Monday that he generally supports the president’s get-tough approach to enforcement. But he also said he plans to reintroduce legislation he sponsored in 2014 that would allow children to stay with their parents while they undergo criminal or deportation proceedings.
“The good news is we have it within our power to find a better way because parents who are awaiting court proceedings shouldn’t have to do so separated from their children,” Cornyn said. “Children shouldn’t be taken from their parents and left frightened and confused about where they are and what is transpiring around them.”
That legislation, known as the HUMANE Act, was introduced with U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat, in response to a wave of unaccompanied children arriving at the border. Cruz also is introducing legislation that he says will keep families together while their immigration cases are pending.
Meanwhile, Democrats, sensing a potent campaign issue, flocked to detention centers around the country in recent days to dramatize the plight of the separated families.
Mississippi U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, also toured the center in Brownsville and took aim at Sessions’ contention about the biblical underpinnings of enforcing the law.
“Attempting to use Scripture to defend the indefensible — needlessly breaking up families — is not compatible with the teachings of any church I know,” Thompson said.
Possible backfire
One sign of growing White House concern about the bad political optics of the separations was seen in a statement released by the office of first lady Melania Trump that sought to balance complicity for the immigration impasse.
“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,” it said. “She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.”
The controversy is likely to bleed into this week’s negotiations in Congress, where Trump is scheduled to huddle with Republicans on Tuesday to discuss a way out of the deadlock on a new immigration law.
White House officials have said that the family separations might give them leverage with Congress to force action on comprehensive immigration legislation limiting both legal and illegal entry into the country. But some conservative pundits have said that strategy, which has sparked global condemnation, appears to be backfiring.
Trump allies also have spoken out against the family separations. Evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, called it “disgraceful.” A host of other religious and child welfare organizations have criticized the policy, which some say could cause the children lasting trauma.
With Republicans split, House Speaker Paul Ryan had planned votes as early as this week on two GOP immigration measures, one of which would address family separations at the border. That negotiation comes as GOP leaders already were facing pressure to address Dreamers, or young immigrants brought into the country illegally as children.
One measure is a plan co-sponsored by Houston-area Republican Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, that gives Trump much of what he wants on limiting immigration, including money for a border wall. A more moderate proposal Ryan plans to put up for a vote would address the child separations by allowing children to be held with their parents in U.S. custody, similar to Cornyn’s plan.
Given the continued divisions over Dreamers and family separations, neither proposal is guaranteed a vote, much less passage. Hurd, who has sought more narrowly-crafted legislation to protect Dreamers, said he does not see the idea of detaining entire families together for indefinite periods of time as a solution.
“If anyone’s waving that as a carrot,” Hurd said, “nobody is biting.”