The acting attorney general of the Biden administration, a longtime career official named Monty Wilkinson, took part in a controversial decision in 2017 to remove an attorney in Texas (DoJ) in Texas who expressed concern about migrating children from their parents are divorced.
E-mails seen by the Guardian show that Wilkinson, who is expected to serve as acting attorney general until Judge Merrick Garland is formally confirmed by the Senate, worked with another longtime career official, Iris Lan, to file charges. about Joshua Stern, a prosecutor who told colleagues he was “disturbed” by the Trump administration’s separation policy.
The policy eventually led to the separation of about 1,500 children from their parents, hundreds of whom have not yet been reunited, although Joe Biden said he would make it one of his top priorities.
Stern, who is no longer employed by the DoJ, was eventually removed from office as temporary details, two weeks after senior Texas officials expressed concern about officials in Washington DC, including Wilkinson.
Wilkinson, who chose Biden to serve as acting attorney general until Garland is confirmed, oversaw human resources, security planning and the library at the Department of Justice before being elevated to serve as acting attorney general.
A recent report in the New York Times suggested that Wilkinson was a credible official, and that his ‘low profile’ almost guarantees that he was not involved in one of the myriad scandals facing the Department of Justice under Donald Trump and the former lawyer did not define. General Bill Barr.
But a report published by the Guardian in September 2020 revealed that Wilkinson was one of several career officials reviewing complaints that ultimately led to Stern’s removal from the western Texas district in 2017.
The report focused on the role that Justice Department official Iris Lan played in reviewing the complaints. Lan was nominated to serve in a lifelong appointment as a federal judge, but the nomination was never taken up in the Senate after a number of immigrant rights groups expressed concern about Lan following the publication of the Guardian article.
It is not clear whether Wilkinson or Lan privately supported or criticized the administration’s policy of child separation when they heard of Stern’s concerns.
At the time of the controversy, Wilkinson was serving as director of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, a role he had been appointed by Eric Holder, Bill Clinton’s former attorney general.
The email seen by the Guardian shows that a DoJ official in Texas named Jose Gonzalez in September 2017 sent a memorandum to the then acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District, Richard Durbin, in which he set out concerns about Stern, including complaints that Stern was “particularly” disturbed “by cases in which defendants could not locate their children.
The western district, in El Paso, at the time was involved in a pilot program to prosecute migrants entering the country illegally, which in turn led to people being separated from their children indefinitely.
The policy was later expanded to include all border states, but was terminated after a scream in Congress and in the press, when stories about divorced migrant children began to become known.
Stern was sent to Texas to help deal with a significant influx of migrant cases. But emails show he was deeply concerned and concerned about the children being divorced, telling prosecutors that the parents being prosecuted ‘regularly flee violence in their home countries’.
He also told Texas lawmakers he contacted agencies to locate missing children. The memo, which was construed as considering Stern’s disobedience, was sent to Lan by Durbin, who told Lan that he did not believe Stern was ‘fully committed to the program’. Durbin wanted to release Stern early from the detail show.
Lan, in turn, said she was unsure about the usual protocol, saying she wanted to share the memo with Wilkinson to get his ‘tasks’ before ‘we move on’. Wilkinson then responded to Lan and Durbin, saying that he and Durbin had talked and that Durbin would send more ‘specific examples’.
Stern sent a termination letter terminating his posting on September 20, 2017, two weeks after concerns first with Lan and later with Wilkinson.
Stern did not respond to questions from the Guardian.
A DoJ spokesman said in a statement: ‘The department cannot comment on specific staffing issues. Regarding the process for detail assignments of components to the US law firms, the decision is to continue a detail between the lending and receiving components. EOUSA plays an administrative role related to the accompanying paperwork, but does not make decisions on assignments. ”
It does not comment further on who made the decision.
A DoJ spokesman under the Trump administration said in response to questions for the previous article on Guardian that Lan received the memo about Stern because of her role as a liaison with U.S. attorneys and did not handle personnel matters.
“She twisted it, in line with her role,” she said.
A recent report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Justice thoroughly examined the role that some officials in the department played in Trump’s separation policy.
The department’s leadership is said to know that the policy will lead to children being separated from their families and that former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions ” shows a lack of understanding of the legal requirements regarding the care and supervision of divorcees. children ”.
“We conclude that the department’s unanimous focus on increasing immigration prosecution is at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of prosecution of family units and child divorces,” the report said.