Trump reverses order, but families still face obstacles
Policy keeps children with parents, but ‘zero tolerance’ remains
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 “zero-tolerance” 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 the 2,300 or so 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 audio recordings of young children crying for
“We’re going to have strong, very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the families together.” President Donald Trump
their parents — images that have sparked fury, questions of morality and concern from Republicans about a negative impact on November’s midterm elections.
Until Wednesday, the president, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and others had repeatedly argued 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. In the end, that’s 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 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.
Under a previous classaction 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.
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.
The 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,” president Richard Cohen said in a statement.
Democrats in Congress objected to the ramifications of Trump’s 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 May was remarkable given his aversion to admitting error or backing down. That reflected the White House’s desperation to quash one of its worst crises to date.
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.
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 releasing parents with their children pending civil hearings and by not pursuing criminal prosecutions nor civil deportation actions, as the Trump administration had begun doing.
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 opting to act 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.