- A new Justice Department report directly involved President Donald Trump in the family’s intolerance of separation policies on the U.S.-Mexico border.
- Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from the policies that have removed children from their adoptive parents.
- In late October, ACLU advocates said the parents of 545 children could not be traced.
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President Donald Trump and top assistants in the White House ‘aggressively’ insisted on the policies that led to children being separated from their immigrant parents at the border, a new report from the Department of Justice.
Gene Hamilton, a top official, wrote in the report that the policy was instituted following complaints from Trump and others in the White House.
“The Attorney General was aware of the White House’s desire for further action in the fight against illegal immigration,” Hamilton said in the report.
Hamilton said former Attorney General Jeff Sessions got the impression that he should act quickly on the issue. Sessions then called on Hamilton to draw up a memorandum that would implement a zero-tolerance restriction on immigration enforcement at the border, “on April 3, 2018.
In October 2020, a draft report from the Department’s Inspector General found that Sessions and other top Justice Department officials were a driving force behind the policy on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The draft report, based on Michael Horowitz’s inquiry into the ‘zero tolerance’ policy, states that Sessions and former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein called for the separation of children from parents, no matter how young they are. wash.
The New York Times reported that law enforcement officials insisted on the policy based on notes from two separate interviews with Sessions and Rosenstein, based on pressure from Trump.
At a May 11, 2018 meeting, Sessions told prosecutors that Trump was “very intense, very focused” on the border issue, reports The Times.
Sessions also told prosecutors: “We need to take children away.”
Rosenstein did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication, but told The Times he regretted his role.
“Since I left the department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no matter has dominated my thinking more than the immigration policy with no tolerance,” he said. “It was a failed policy that should never have been proposed or implemented. I wish we had all done better.”
In the October draft report, Rosenstein allegedly doubled Sessions’ mandate to take prosecutors away from children.
He told prosecutors they should not prosecute two cases because the children were very young, reports The Times.
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The immigration policy of Trump’s zero-tolerance ‘immigration policy has led to the separation of thousands of migrant children on the border between the United States and Mexico from their parents.
Women who were breastfeeding said immigration authorities had separated them from their babies at the border. In October, The Times reported that the draft report appeared to confirm this, with a prosecutor writing: “I did not believe it until I looked at the duty log.”
In a court case filed in late October 2020, U.S. Civil Liberties Union lawyers said they could not find the parents of 545 migrant children who were divorced because of the Trump administration policy. They added that they believe that ‘about two thirds’ of the parents were deported without their children.
During several cases, Trump and other administrative officials tried to distance themselves from the policy. The president even falsely claimed at one point that the Democrats were behind the policy.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment during the publication.