WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden’s choice to head the Department of Justice temporarily, Interim Attorney General Monty Wilkinson, signed a 2017 decision to remove a prosecutor from his post after the prosecutor’s superiors complained that he was not adequately prosecuting parents. migrants separated from their children, according to documents reviewed by NBC News.
Wilkinson, who previously served as deputy chief of staff to former Attorney General Eric Holder, was not a Trump nominee when he received complaints about Joshua Stern, a lawyer assigned to the Western Texas District in 2017. He was dealing with personnel issues as a director of the United States Attorneys’ Executive Board – a position for which he was appointed by the Principal in 2014.
In a memo sent to Wilkinson on September 11, 2017, Stern’s superiors said he was not doing his job properly because he was “very concerned” about the cases in which he was asked to sue an immigrant father who had been separated and not know your child’s whereabouts.
“He has expressed repeated concerns about the separation of children from their parents,” said the memo on Stern.
The parents in question were separated from their children in the El Paso area in what is now recognized as a pilot program for the Trump administration’s 2018 “zero tolerance” policy, which intentionally separated more than 3,000 migrant families.
Wilkinson’s receipt of the memo would have alerted him that families were being separated in El Paso long before the existence of the pilot program was known to the public or even began to circulate in political memos among Trump officials in Washington.
“Stern seemed particularly disturbed that our office had processed these cases,” said the memo. “He commented that our lawsuits resulted in children separated from their parents when parents often fled the violence in their country of origin. He informed us that he contacted agencies so that he could assist the defense in the process of locating the defendant’s children.”
The memo was sent in response to a September 8 request from Wilkinson for more details about Stern after Wilkinson’s call with Stern’s chief, then US Attorney for the Western Texas District, Richard L. Durbin, of according to an internal email reviewed by NBC Notícias.
The memo accompanied an official letter from Durbin to Wilkinson, asking him “is there any way to end the relationship [with Stern] early, it would probably be better for everyone involved. “
Related: “The situation on the border is not going to change overnight,” a senior Biden transition official told NBC News in an exclusive interview.
In that letter, Durbin said that Stern had “sympathies [that] seem to lie to the aliens we’re suing. ”Durbin also said that Stern was” warned at least twice “for being late for work and was” somewhat difficult to deal with “.
On September 20, nine days after Durbin’s letter to Wilkinson, Wilkinson sent the appropriate paperwork to release Stern from his posting earlier, according to a document reviewed by NBC News. Wilkinson’s office had to give permission before Stern could be removed from his position in advance and in the short term and transferred to another position in the federal government.
Wilkinson, who is temporarily serving as an interim attorney general until Biden’s attorney general nominee Merrick Garland is confirmed, has been seen as a longtime career officer whose low profile has kept him out of dealing with anything that could be considered controversial or a conflict of interest for the next government.
A current Justice Department spokeswoman said Wilkinson’s office at the time of Stern’s transfer, the US Attorneys’ Executive Office, “performs an administrative role related to associated paperwork but does not make decisions about assignments” in relation to detailed staff.
“The department cannot comment on specific personnel matters. Regarding the process of assigning component details to the United States Public Ministry, the decision to continue detailing is between the loan and receipt components, ”said the spokeswoman.
The Guardian first reported on Stern’s transfer, and part of Wilkinson’s involvement in it, in September 2020. A White House spokesman declined to comment on whether Biden’s transition team knew about Wilkinson’s role in transfer from Stern or came across The Guardian’s report during the Wilkinson verification for the position.
Related: Former DOJ employee Rod Rosenstein told NBC News that zero tolerance “was a failed policy that should never have been proposed or implemented.”
Durbin declined to comment on his requests to reassign Stern earlier or his communications with Wilkinson. Stern did not respond to a request for comment.
Biden said he is committed to bringing families of migrants separated by the Trump administration and is expected to announce a task force to do so in the coming days. Biden said he would leave it to his Justice Department to determine whether any officials involved in the policy committed criminal conduct or not.