WASHINGTON – After a hard-hitting Justice Department report blamed top department officials for being the “driving force” behind the 2018 Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein issued a statement of regret and current DOJ officer Gene Hamilton blamed the president for the policy.
In interviews with the DOJ Inspector General’s Office prior to the report, Gene Hamilton, known as a close ally of White House adviser Stephen Miller, said the decision to separate families, a controversial policy known as “zero tolerance” that has lasted two months in 2018 before being closed by executive order, ultimately fell to President Donald Trump and then Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen.
“If Secretary Nielsen and DHS did not want to refer people with minors, with children, then we would not have prosecuted them, because they would not have forwarded them. And, ultimately, the decision would be between Secretary Nielsen and the President, ”said Hamilton. said to the Office of the Inspector General, according to the report.
In response to the report, Rosenstein, who left the department in May 2019, said in a statement to NBC News: “Ever since I left the department, I have always wondered what we should have done differently, and no problem dominated my thinking anymore. than the zero-tolerance immigration policy. It was a failed policy that should never have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better. “
During an April 20, 2018 meeting at the Justice Department, then-attorney general Jeff Sessions, Rosenstein, Hamilton and others met with Nielsen, the report says. There, according to Hamilton’s notes, “the attorney general and the deputy attorney general expressed a willingness to sue adults in family units if DHS made the decision to start referring such individuals to the prosecution.”
The sessions refused to be interviewed by the Inspector General and could not be reached for comment. The White House referred NBC News to the Justice Department for comment.
NBC News previously reported a preliminary version of the report in October.
The report, published by the Justice Department’s Inspector General on Thursday, more than two years after the end of the policy, gathers decisions made by senior Trump administration officials that led to the separation of more than 3,000 migrant families.
“We conclude that the Department’s unique focus on increasing immigration processes came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of processes by family unit and child separations,” said the Inspector General’s report.
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy has instructed U.S. prosecutors to prosecute all adults who cross the southern border illegally – a misdemeanor offense – regardless of whether they have children or not. As a result, border agents were instructed to send the children to the custody of the Health and Human Services while their parents were being prosecuted.
According to the report, several US prosecutors along the southern border have raised concerns about whether the migrant parents they were being asked to sue would reunite with their children or whether some of the children might be too young to be separated.
The then attorney general of the Western District of Texas, John Bash, communicated to other American attorneys his understanding of the policy based on his guidance from Rosenstein.
“I just spoke to DAG (Rosenstein). He instructed that, as per the [Attorney General’s] policy, we should NOT categorically refuse adult immigration court proceedings in family units because of the age of a child, “according to Bash’s notes contained in the report.
In a lawsuit on Wednesday, pro-bono lawyers tasked with finding separated families and giving them a chance to reunite, said they had not yet met the parents of 611 children. Of these, lawyers estimate, the parents of 392 children were deported, making it more difficult to locate them.
The report could provide a roadmap for the next Biden administration to investigate policymakers that President-elect Joe Biden called criminal.
Biden pledged to create a task force to find separated families and to have a “full investigation conducted by the Justice Department on who is responsible and whether the responsibility is criminal or not”.
Biden made that promise at a news conference last week, noting that his attorney general would ultimately make the decision on who to sue.
A former DOJ official, speaking on condition of anonymity, responded to the report by telling NBC News: “I think the most important thing about this is the profound forethought and the intentionality of the entire effort to separate the family, regardless of the known damage that would come to parents and children. And a strong belief in the actors here, and it is assumed in other parts of the government, that cruelty was the intention and that it was an acceptable way for the government to operate for four years. “
