Executive order:
President Trump moves to alter family-separation policy.
WASHINGTON — President Trump caved to enormous political pressure on Wednesday and signed an executive order meant to end the separation of families at the border by detaining parents and children together for an indefinite period.
“We’re going to have strong — very strong — borders, but we are going to keep the families together,” Trump said as he signed the order in the Oval Office. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.”
But ending the practice of separating families still faces legal and practical obstacles. A federal judge could refuse to give the Trump administration the authority it wants to hold families in custody for more than 20 days, which is the current limit because of a 1997 court order.
And the president’s order does nothing to address the plight of the more than 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents under the president’s “zero tolerance” policy. Federal officials said those children will not be immediately reunited with their families while the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration proceedings.
“There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,” said Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Wolfe said the decision about the children was made by the White House, but he added, “I can tell you definitively that is going to be policy.”
The president signed the executive order days after he said that the only way to end the division of families was through congressional action because “you can’t do it through an executive order.” But he changed his mind after a barrage of criticism from Democrats, activists, members of his own party.
Stories of children being taken from their parents, audio of wailing toddlers and images of teenagers in cagelike detention facilities had exploded into a full-blown political crisis for Trump and congressional Republicans, who were desperate for a response to those who have called the practice “inhumane,” “cruel” and “evil.”
The president’s four-page order says that officials will continue to criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the border illegally, but will seek to find or build facilities that can hold families — parents and children together — instead of separating them while their legal cases are considered by the courts.
But the action raised new questions that White House officials did not immediately answer. The order does not say where the families would be detained. And it does not say whether children will continue to be separated from their parents while the facilities to hold them are located or built.