Hurd blasts border separations, child camps
WASHINGTON — Texas Republican Will Hurd blasted the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant parents from children Saturday after touring the new Tornillo tent camp.
“Separating kids from their families is a bad idea,” said Hurd, the first congressman to get inside the tent camp in his border district. “We shouldn’t be doing this. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, you shouldn’t be using kids as part of our deterrence strategy.”
Hurd’s remarks came on the eve of a planned Father’s Day march to protest the camp, which is outside El Paso. Among those leading the march are U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, and Lupe Valdez, a Democrat challenging Gov. Greg Abbott.
Hurd, facing a tough re-election challenge in a heavily Latino district between San Antonio and El Paso, said objections to the family separation policy transcend partisan politics.
“This isn’t a Democratic or Republican issue,” he said. “This is bad policy.”
Hurd also ripped the White House’s announced strategy of using the public’s uneasiness over the family separations to get Democratic backing for a new GOP-led immigration bill with beefed-up border security.
“If anyone’s waving that as a carrot, nobody is biting,” Hurd said.
Hurd’s criticism stands out from many other leading Republicans in Texas, including U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who have justified the policy as a deterrent to illegal immigration.
Cruz, speaking to reporters Saturday at the state Republican Party convention in San Antonio, said the migrants are themselves to blame for putting their children at risk. He also maintained that the family separations occurred before President Donald Trump’s new “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting illegal border crossers.
“There’s no doubt that the images that we’ve seen of children, and children being separated from their parents, are heartbreaking,” Cruz said. “They were heartbreaking when Obama was president.”
Democrats dispute that President Barack Obama pursued a family separation policy as a deterrence strategy as the Trump administration has.
Hurd rejected the deterrence strategy. “If your strategy for border security involves separating kids, then you need to rethink that strategy,” he said.
Hurd, who visited the Tornillo tent camp Friday night, said the facility has 400 beds to house 16and 17-year-old boys who arrived at the border unaccompanied by other family members. He said most had come from other facilities to make room for younger children being housed because of family separations.
He said there are about 20 youths per tent, supervised by two adults in each shelter.
Hurd took issue with GOP congressional leaders who insist that new compromise border legislation they are proposing would help end the family separations.
“If you read the details of one of the plans that’s allegedly being voted on next week, the way they’re proposing ending family separations is by allowing the indefinite detention of families,” Hurd said. “That’s not solving the problem.”
Hurd said he doubts that any of the immigration bills that GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan is expected to bring to the House floor have any chance of passing with only Republican support.
“I’ve participated in a lot of meetings on immigration, and there’s never been a 218-vote Republican solution to immigration,” he said, referring the threshold for a House majority. “And this is an issue that I think we should be trying to solve it in a bipartisan fashion.”
Hurd also took issue with claims by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other Trump administration officials that the tough new family separation policy has a Biblical grounding.
“I’m not a biblical scholar,” Hurd said, “but I don’t think taking a four-year-old away from their mother is something that we should do.”