Amid a national outcry over the temporary separation of children from parents prosecuted for entering the country illegally, President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to keep the families together.
“We want to keep families together. It’s very important,” Trump told reporters during a White House meeting with members of Congress.
Congressional Republicans have proposed emergency legislation targeting the issue but face opposition from Democrats who charge the GOP will insert “unacceptable additions” in any bill.
Prior to Trump’s executive order, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the Senate minority leader, had insisted the president must end the family separations on his own.
Earlier Wednesday, Trump indicated the executive order was in the works and said it would “be matched by legislation.”
The families are separated because of a 1997 order and related decisions that prohibit children from being detained for longer than 20 days with the adults. The number of separations has increased dramatically since the Trump administration initiated a “zero tolerance” immigration policy in which it refers all cases of illegal entry to the Justice Department for prosecution.
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Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have been calling on Congress for a bill that will close the “loopholes” regarding family detention.
Sources have told Fox News that any executive action by Trump could conflict with the 1997 order and face a court challenge.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said the House will vote Thursday on legislation to keep the families together during legal proceedings.
“We do not want children taken away from their parents,” Ryan said. “We can enforce our immigration laws without breaking families apart.”
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., pushed back against Schumer’s Trump-only approach to the issue in a tweet.
“I introduced a clean bill today to allow immigrant families to stay together at the border. H.R. 6143. Why is Chuck Schumer preemptively opposing solutions like this?” he asked.
“Could it be because he’d rather talk about President Trump and politics than actually solve the problem?”
I introduced a clean bill today to allow immigrant families to stay together at the border. H.R. 6143. Why is Chuck Schumer preemptively opposing solutions like this?
Could it be because he’d rather talk about President Trump and politics than actually solve the problem? https://t.co/Ma3lF5KVGK
— Mark Meadows (@RepMarkMeadows) June 19, 2018
On Tuesday evening, Trump held a closed-door meeting in which he told House Republicans he is “1,000 percent” behind their immigration bills.
Under the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, adults are moved to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and children go to facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Most of the children crossing the border are unaccompanied minors, and the problem has been compounded by human smugglers send children across the border with unrelated adults who falsely present themselves as families.
The Washington Times recalled the Washington Post reporting in 2016 the Obama administration “failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.”
DHS said more than 2,300 minors were separated from their families at the border from May 5 through June 9.
On Wednesday, Trump again blamed Democrats for the failure of Congress to pass immigration reform.
“It’s the Democrats fault, they won’t give us the votes needed to pass good immigration legislation,” he wrote. “They want open borders, which breeds horrible crime. Republicans want security. But I am working on something – it never ends!”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has proposed emergency legislation that would allow detained families to stay together in custody while expediting their hearings and possible deportation proceedings.
His bill, among other things, also would double the number of federal immigration judges and authorize new temporary shelters.
Protesters of the administration’s policy clashed with law enforcement in several cities Tuesday while a small group of House Democrats confronted Trump as he walked out of his session with GOP lawmakers in the Capitol basement.
“Stop separating our families!” the Democrats yelled.
Nielsen, the Washington Times reported, was heckled by protesters as she dined Tuesday night at a Mexican restaurant in Washington with shouts of “Shame!” and “End family separation!”
A DHS spokesman later that the secretary and her staff heard Tuesday night from protesters who “share her concern with our current immigration laws.”
On Wednesday, actor Peter Fonda asked in a tweet for a mob of people to “rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles.” He also called for violence against Nielsen and called White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders a “c—.”
A spokeswoman for first lady Melania Trump, Stephanie Grisham, said the Secret Service has been notified of the threat.
‘Children are being marched away to showers’
The Daily Caller published a feature noting that amid the outrage by media and politicians over the Trump administration’s decision to detain and prosecute immigrants illegally crossing the border is the lack of any acknowledgment that President Obama’s administration also used detention facilities.
The Obama administration prosecuted half a million illegal immigrants from 2010 to 2016 and similarly separated families in the process, as did the Bush administration.
According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, nearly 200,000 children were referred by the DHS from 2012 to 2016. These children either were separated by their families or were unaccompanied minors.
In its report, the Daily Caller featured photographs taken during a 2014 media tour of Obama-era detention facilities in Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, Arizona.
Meanwhile, the Media Research Center blog Newsbusters found 22 instances since Friday in which cable news commentators compared the separation of parents and children illegally entering the country to World War II-era war crimes and human rights violations.
The Holocaust was invoked 12 times across CNN and MSNBC between June 15 and the 18, Newsbusters said, generally in the form of comparisons between DHS detention centers and Nazi concentration camps.
There were also six mentions of Japanese-American internment camps and four comparisons to slavery.
On Friday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough opened “Morning Joe” with a Holocaust reference.
“Children are being marched away to showers,” he said, “just like the Nazis said they were taking people to the showers, and then they never came back. You’d think they would use another trick.”
‘A very cowardly response’
Nielsen was hit with passionately delivered questions from reporters at the White House daily briefing Monday.
She was asked how she would respond to Democrat charges that the administration is using illegal immigrant children as “leverage” to force Congress to overhaul the immigration system and build a border wall.
“I’d say that is a very cowardly response,” she said. “It is within their power to make the laws and change the laws, and they should do so.”
Another reporter asked Nielsen if she had seen the photos circulating of children in cages and audio clips of children “wailing,” which were released Monday.
Nielsen said she hadn’t heard the recordings, and in a follow-up was asked if that is the “image of children that you want out there.”
“The image I want of this country is of an immigration system secures that our borders and upholds our humanitarian ideals,” she replied. “Congress needs to fix it.”
She was asked again about the photos and recordings of crying children and asked if they were an intended or unintended consequence of administration policy.
“I think that they reflect the focus of those who post such pictures and narratives,” Nielsen said. “The narratives we don’t see are the narratives of the crime, of the opiods, of the smugglers, of people who are killed by gang members. American children who are recruited and then when they lose the drugs they are tased and beaten.
“We don’t have a balanced view of what is happening,” she said.
The border is “being overrun by those who have no right to cross it.”
She urged people who are seeking asylum to go to a port of entry, where they can initiate the proper application process.
