Trump defies border backlash
He again blames Democrats for separating families
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump stood defiant Monday against a growing backlash about his administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that since April has separated at least 2,000 children from their parents crossing the southern border, and he continued to falsely blame Democrats for the hardline actions.
“The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” an indignant Trump said at the White House, adding, “Not on my watch.”
“You take a look at the death and destruction that’s been caused by people coming into this country, without going through a process,” the president told his audience, a meeting of his National Space Council.
Assailing Democrats for opposing his proposed immigration limits, he said Republicans “want safety and we want security for our country. If the Democrats would sit down, instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly.”
Furor has swirled against his policy after a Father’s Day weekend of media coverage featuring images of children locked inside large metal cages, crying toddlers and distraught parents.
Some Republican allies in Congress, conservative religious leaders and former first lady Laura Bush joined a chorus of critics lambasting the family-separation policy as “inhumane” and “im-
moral,” and comparing it to the internment of Japanese-Americans, and even Nazi camps, during World War II.
Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, typically a Trump supporter, tweeted on Monday, “While I firmly support enforcing our immigration laws, I am against using parental separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration.” Another Republican, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, was harsher, rejecting Trump’s claims that only Congress could fix “this cruel policy.”
“Some in the administration have decided that this cruel policy increases their legislative leverage. This is wrong,” Sasse wrote on Facebook. “Americans do not take children hostage, period.”
Trump is set to meet with House Republicans today on pending immigration bills, which now have become possible vehicles for addressing the border plight. Yet the president, despite his claims that Congress must act, has the power to unilaterally reverse a policy that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, heralded in April, formally outlined in May and reinforced as recently as Monday.
Trump has indicated in multiple tweets during recent days that he is using the policy — which he, too, claims to hate — as leverage to get Democrats to agree to limits on legal immigration as well as provide $25 billion for his promised border wall.
Some Republicans, especially in the House, have encouraged that strategy.
Democrats rallied around a bill sponsored by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which would prohibit separating families unless agents suspect abuse or childtrafficking.
The president, in a series of tweets early Monday, shifted a bit from insisting the policy had been forced on his administration to implicitly defending the policy by pointing to Europe and suggesting immigrants are a detriment to the cultures of the nations there.
U.S. Rep. David Valadao, a California Republican, called on the administration to cease the policy until Congress finds a solution to what he called “a humanitarian and national security crisis,” referring to the increase in children crossing the border illegally amid growing gang- and drug-related violence in their countries.
A Quinnipiac University national poll released Monday showed what little support he has — and how little pressure Democrats feel to give ground. American voters oppose the separation policy by a 66 percent to 27 percent margin, it found, with opposition across every age and demographic group except Republicans.
Reflecting the administration’s defensiveness, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen falsely claimed in a tweet Sunday that the administration “[does] not have a policy of separating families at the border.”
In a statement citing that tweet, California Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democrat, called on Nielsen to resign.
On Monday, Nielsen said the administration would not apologize for following what she said was the law, in comments at the National Sheriffs’ Association in New Orleans. “Let’s be honest,” she said, “there are some who would like us to look the other way … and not enforce the law.”
Nielsen insisted that children are being treated humanely and blamed the detention controversy on would-be immigrants’ abuse of the asylum system. Some adults, she said, were using children as a “get out of jail free card” because federal law limits the time children can be held in custody with their families.
Social media lit up Sunday night after The Washington Post published an op-ed column by Laura Bush, the previous Republican first lady, in which she likened the treatment of immigrant children to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero tolerance policy is cruel,” Bush wrote. “It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.”
The Rev. Franklin Graham, a Trump booster usually, called the family separations “disgraceful.”