Top Trump Officials: "We need to take away children"

[lpetrich]

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

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.

 

[lpetrich]

Revealed: Rod Rosenstein advised there was no age limit on child separations | US news | The Guardian

The comments on a conference call in May 2018 privately shocked some border state prosecutors because, in effect, it meant that no child was too young to be separated from its parents under the policy, which called for all migrants entering the US illegally to face criminal prosecution.
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Read more

The family separations that followed are seen today by experts as one of the gravest domestic human rights violations to have occurred under the Trump administration.

The policy was in place for six weeks and resulted in the separation of 2,814 children from their parents and guardians, about 105 of whom were under the age of five and 1,033 under 10.

...
Previously, under the Obama administration, most families who crossed the border illegally were detained together if they were arrested or were released pending an immigration trial, but were only separated if authorities deemed children to be in danger.

...
Under the zero-tolerance policy, hundreds of parents were deported to their home countries without their children and the family separations were later deemed by a federal judge in California to be unconstitutional, “brutal” and “offensive”. The government’s conduct, Judge Dana Sabraw said, arbitrarily tore at the “sacred bond between parent and child”.

The policy was in place from 6 April 2018 to 20 June 2018 when, facing intense legal and congressional pressure, it was ended by an executive order by Donald Trump.

Internal report finds Justice Department aided and abetted Trump’s child separation border policy.

The U.S. border policy under the Trump administration that for two months in mid-2018 separated children from their undocumented parents as a cruel means of deterrence was one of the early—and still most instructive—abominations of the Trump presidency. As time passes, expect Trump officials to edge away from responsibility for the program, as many already have. In fact, the finger-pointing and responsibility contortions started almost immediately after the public backlash against the policy. Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions told CBN in June 2018 that the Trump administration “never really intended” to separate migrant children from their families. But a New York Times report on the coming Justice Department inspector general’s report tells a very different story—one of a policy that is a moral outrage and was pushed by DOJ officials at the very top of the central organ of American legal infrastructure.

Will Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein now whine that they were only following orders?

 

[marc]

Saw an update that they are still working on reuniting kids with their families. Glad that they haven't just been forgotten. Mad that there are still 1,000 kids that haven't been reunited.

#BidenDelivers: Nearly 700 Children Reunited With Their Families

According to figures released by the Department of Homeland Security, 3,881 children were separated from their families from 2017 to 2021.

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