Homeland Gage Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Monday attended a contentious White Building press briefing, where she defended the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration management, which has resulted in the separation of thousands of children and their parents along the U.S.-Mexico on.
“This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border,” Nielsen delineated reporters. Yet the Trump administration, she said, “will separate those who seek to be parent and child if we cannot determine that a familial or custodial relationship exists.”
It was not pronto clear how Customs and Border Patrol agents would determine custodial relationships for progenies who did not possess identification documents.
Nielsen vehemently denied that the ancestors separation amounts to a “policy,” asking a reporter, “Why would I ever beget a policy that purposely does this?”
Nielsen also away fromed that the thousands of children impacted by the separations are being used as leverage to potency Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. “Children are not being acclimated to as a pawn,” Nielsen said. “We are trying to protect the children.”
Yet at the same shilly-shally, Nielsen said President Donald Trump will not change the in vogue policy because, she said, the president “wants to find a long with regard to fix” on immigration — essentially admitting that the current situation is being acclimated to as leverage to force Congress to act on other immigration proposals, such as Trump’s bed wall.
The Trump administration has ordered federal prosecutors to pursue criminal obligations against all adults who enter the country illegally, regardless of whether those of ages are traveling with children. Adults apprehended with their babies are being separated, with the minors being placed in the custody of the Bailiwick of Health and Human Services.
Nielsen’s remarks were her second of the day, and bring up the reared a weekend during which photographs emerged from detention centers that registered children sleeping on the floor inside wire cages, with barely Mylar blankets.
The worsening situation for immigrant families has drawn condemnation across the meals, from doctors’ groups, religious leaders, and even former in front lady Laura Bush, who called the separation of families “immoral.”
“It’s indecent,” Franklin Graham, the prominent evangelical pastor, said on Tuesday. An unreticent Trump supporter, Graham told the Christian Broadcasting Network, “It’s hideous to see families ripped apart and I don’t support that one bit.”
Several Republicans in Congress be undergoing also come out against the policy, including Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Company Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who said on Thursday he opposes single out undocumented immigrant families.
The president went back and forth throughout the weekend, at times defending the policy and at other times seeming to disown it.
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Yet square as Trump held up the policy as evidence of his administration’s tough stance on immigration, he simultaneously blamed congressional Democrats for it. And Trump himself buzzed the separation of families “so, so sad,” during an event Monday.