Senate judiciary panel skewers officials on family separation
WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials defended the rationale for their now-defunct family separation strategy during tense Senate testimony Tuesday, but they did not challenge lawmakers’ assertions that the initiative was a failure.
Facing scathing criticism from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, one senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official pushed back at allegations that authorities mistreated migrants in their custody, instead likening his agency’s family detention centers to “summer camp.”
“These individuals have access to 24/7 food and water,” said Matthew Albence, a top ICE official. “They have educational opportunities. They have recreational opportunities, both structured as well as unstructured, there’s basketball courts, there’s exercise classes, there’s soccer fields we put in there.”
But this and other defensive statements drew the ire of lawmakers such as Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who dared the five Trump officials to tell the panel that the administration’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown was a success. Not one raised a hand.
“Who is responsible for zero tolerance or family separation?” Blumenthal pressed.
“They probably can’t answer that or they’d get fired,” quipped Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee chairman.
Tuesday’s hearing was a wide-ranging probe of immigration enforcement practices and the administration’s attempt to deter illegal border crossings by removing more than 2,500 children from their parents and sending them to government shelters. After six weeks, President Donald Trump abruptly reversed the policy June 20, and days later U.S. District Court Judge Dana M. Sabraw, a Republican appointee, ordered the government to return the children as urgently as possible.
The administration has reunited more than 1,800 children and is now working the more complex cases of parents with criminal records or the more than 450 who were deported without their sons and daughters.
Some of the more candid answers came from Cmdr. Jonathan White, the public health official who organized the reunification effort at Health and Human Services. He said more than 250 federal caseworkers and contractors have been enlisted and that he had been working “18 hour days” for the past month.
White, who was a top official in the HHS office that cares for migrant children weeks before the Trump administration announced “zero tolerance,” told senators, too, that he had warned his superiors that separating children from their parents carried a “significant risk of harm,” and could inflict “psychological injury.”
None of the other top officials who testified Tuesday said they had been briefed in advance that the White House was moving forward with its dramatic crackdown until it was announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in early April.
When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., prodded the panelists to identify what went wrong, White was the only official who acknowledged a mistake.
“What went wrong is the children separated from their parents were referred as a unaccompanied alien children when in fact they were accompanied,” he said.
Albence, the ICE official, deflected senators’ questions about care for migrant families in federal custody, including the “family residential centers” he compared to a summer camp. That drew stunned expressions from the Democrats.
Sen. Mazie Hirono, DHawaii, asked the Trump officials if they would want their children to be detained in one of the ICE facilities. She drew no affirmative responses.