- A new Justice Department report directly implicated President Donald Trump in the zero tolerance family separation policy on the U.S. border with Mexico.
- Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from the policy that deprived children of their migrant parents.
- In late October, ACLU’s lawyers said the parents of 545 children could not be located.
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President Donald Trump and top White House advisers pressed “aggressively” for the policy that led children to be separated from their immigrant parents on the border, a new Justice Department report.
Gene Hamilton, a senior official wrote in the report that the policy was enacted following complaints from Trump and others at the White House.
“The attorney general was aware of the White House’s wishes for new actions related to combating illegal immigration,” Hamilton said in the report.
Hamilton said that former attorney general Jeff Sessions had the impression that he needed to act quickly on the matter. Sessions then told Hamilton to write a memo that would put in place a zero tolerance approach to border immigration enforcement “on April 3, 2018.
In October 2020, a draft report from the department’s inspector general found that Sessions and other senior Justice Department officials were “a driving force” behind the policy on the United States’ border with Mexico.
This preliminary report, based on Michael Horowitz’s investigation of the “zero tolerance” policy, said that Sessions and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called for the separation of the children from their parents, no matter how young they are.
The New York Times reported that, based on notes from two separate interviews with Sessions and Rosenstein, police officers were pushing for politics 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, the Times reported.
The sessions also told prosecutors, “We need to get the kids out.”
Rosenstein did not respond to Insider’s request for comment at the time of publication, but told The Times that he regretted his role.
“Since I left the department, I have often wondered what we should have done differently, and no problem has dominated my thinking more than zero tolerance immigration policy,” he said. “It was a failed policy that should never have been proposed or implemented. I wish we had all done better.”
In the draft of the October report, Rosenstein allegedly doubled Sessions’ order for prosecutors to take children.
He told prosecutors that they should not have refused to sue two cases because the children were too young, the Times reported.
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The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy has caused thousands of migrant children to be separated from their parents on the United States’ border with Mexico.
Women who were breastfeeding said that immigration authorities separated them from their babies at the border. In October, The Times reported that the draft report seemed to confirm this, with a prosecutor writing: “I didn’t believe it until I looked at the on-call record.”
In a lawsuit filed in late October 2020, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union said they were unable to find the parents of 545 migrant children who were separated as a result of the Trump administration’s policy. They added that they believe that “approximately two-thirds” of these parents were deported without their children.
During several cases, Trump and other government officials tried to distance themselves from politics. The president even falsely claimed that the Democrats were behind the policy.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.