Trump defiant as crisis grows over family separation
President continues to falsely blame Democrats for policy he can cancel
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s move to separate immigrant families at the border and detain children apart from their parents spiraled into a humanitarian and political crisis Monday as the White House struggled to contain the growing public outcry.
The situation has become a moral test for President Donald Trump and his administration. The president on Monday voiced defiance and continued to falsely blame congressional Democrats for what he decried as a “horrible and tough” situation. But Trump is empowered to immediately order border agents to stop separating families as a result of his “zero tolerance” enforcement policy.
The president asserted that the parents illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border with their children “could be murderers and thieves and so much else,” echoing his incendiary remarks about immigrants at his campaign launch in 2015. And in a series of dark tweets, the president warned that undocumented immigrants could increase gang crime and usher in cultural changes.
“The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” Trump said in midday speech. “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.”
More than 2,300 children were taken from their parents at the border between May 5 and June 9, according to statistics released Monday by the Department of Homeland Security, with the pace of family separations growing over that period to nearly 70 a day.
The separations were roundly condemned — including by all four living former first ladies — as cruel, inhumane and un-American. Administration officials rejected former first lady Laura Bush’s comparison of the detention centers to Japanese internment camps in World War II.
The White House said that people killed by illegal immigrants were the true victims because they were “permanently” separated from their family members, even listing crimes in a document that Trump aides shared with allies.
Though the administration has tried to present a public picture of steely resolve — vowing not to apologize for enforcing the law, as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Monday — senior officials have disagreed behind the scenes about the merits and morality of separating children from their parents.
“Parents who entered illegally are, by definition, criminals,” Nielsen told reporters during an unusually contentious White House press briefing. “By entering our country illegally, often in dangerous circumstances, illegal immigrants have put their children at risk.”
Nielsen maintained that her agency was merely enforcing existing law and said it was up to Congress to change the policy. “It is the beginning of the unraveling of democracy when the body who makes the laws, instead of changing them, tells the enforcement body not to enforce the law,” she said.
But many lawmakers disagreed with that assessment.
“The White House can fix it if they want to,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said. “I don’t think there’s any question about that.”
Nielsen also said the administration is not using its “zero tolerance” policy
to pressure Congress to act on Trump’s broader immigration agenda or to deter migrants from coming to the country, contradicting comments from other administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, chief of staff John Kelly and senior adviser Stephen Miller.
The crisis is garnering round-theclock television news coverage, with journalists reporting about their first glimpses at the concrete-floor and metal-cage conditions of the detention centers.
Nielsen acknowledged she was not keeping pace with coverage of the crisis, including audio of wailing children published a few hours earlier by ProPublica. She said she did not know why the administration had released images Sunday of young boys in detention center cages at a Texas facility but not of young girls.
Trump has been closely monitoring the coverage, but has been suspicious of it, telling associates he believes the media cherry-picks the most dramatic images and stories to portray his administration in a negative light, according to one senior administration official.
The images in the media contrast with more positive photos Trump’s aides have shown the president depicting detained children smiling, playing video games and exercising outside, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.
Trump and his advisers were unable to stanch the wellspring of public opposition. Some Republican elected officials joined Democrats in sounding moral outrage and calling for an immediate end to the administration’s family separation policy.
In an indication that GOP leaders fear negative ramifications in November’s midterm elections, Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio, who chairs the House Republicans’ campaign arm, called on the administration to change its policy and “stop needlessly separating children from their families.”
Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., said, “It’s
time for this ugly and inhumane practice to end. Now.” He added, “It’s never acceptable to use kids as bargaining chips in political process.”
And Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., wrote in a statement, “Family separation is wicked. It is harmful to kids and absolutely should NOT be the default U.S. policy. Americans are better than this. … The administration’s decision to separate families is a new, discretionary choice.”
Two polls released Monday showed the public overwhelmingly against separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents at the border. A CNN survey found that 28 percent of Americans approve of the policy and 67 percent disapprove, while a Quinnipiac University poll had a similar finding, 27 percent of American voters approving of the policy and 66 percent disapproving.
Trump heads to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to meet with House Republicans and push for immigration legislation that would provide funding for his promised border wall, among other priorities. Senior administration officials suggested the humanitarian crisis at the border was leverage to force legislators to pass such a law.
“We do not want to separate parents from their children,” Sessions, an architect and key defender of the policy, said in a speech Monday. “If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won’t face these terrible choices.”
House Republicans are expected to vote this week on two immigration bills — a hard-line measure drafted by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and a second bill cast as a compromise between the moderate and conservative wings of the GOP.
House leaders were rushing to insert provisions into both House measures that would not separate parents from their children, according to a senior GOP aide, and allow children to be detained indefinitely with their parents. The prospect of passage for either bill is murky at best. If neither bill garners the necessary support, lawmakers would have to decide whether to introduce a stand-alone bill addressing family separation.