lpetrich
Contributor
Cori Bush on Twitter: "Rod Rosenstein demanded that immigration officials separate parents from their children—no matter how young they were.
Including breastfeeding mothers from their infants.
This is a human rights violation and needs to be prosecuted as such from the top down." / Twitter
When I read that, I was skeptical. What was going on here? So I tracked down recent news stories about Trump-admin officials wanting to separate families. Sure enough, I found some.
‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ Jeff Sessions Said - The New York Times
Including breastfeeding mothers from their infants.
This is a human rights violation and needs to be prosecuted as such from the top down." / Twitter
When I read that, I was skeptical. What was going on here? So I tracked down recent news stories about Trump-admin officials wanting to separate families. Sure enough, I found some.
‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ Jeff Sessions Said - The New York Times
Top department officials were “a driving force” behind President Trump’s child separation policy, a draft investigation report said.
WASHINGTON — The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare.
But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy.
“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”
Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.
...
The separation of migrant children from their parents, sometimes for months, was at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on immigration. But the fierce backlash when the administration struggled to reunite the children turned it into one of the biggest policy debacles of the president’s term.
“The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and effective implementation of the policy, especially with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations,” the draft report said.