Documents Show Top Justice Department Officials Pushed Family Separation Policy: ‘We Need to Take Away Children’
A watchdog investigative report claims that top officials in the Justice Department were a “driving force” behind the Trump administration’s policy of taking the children of undocumented immigrants from their parents.
The New York Times obtained a draft report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, which provides details on how Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and others advanced President Donald Trump’s push for a “zero-tolerance” family separation policy. The report says multiple U.S. attorneys around the border were “deeply concerned” by the order 2 years ago, but Sessions and Rosenstein held conference calls with prosecutors and pushed them to go forward with it.
From the Times:
“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.
Rosenstein referred to the two cases under the purview of John Bash, an outgoing U.S. attorney in western Texas who wrote to staff after the call and said, “those two cases should not have been declined.” The day before, the cases were declined due to the young age of the defendants’ children.
The report elaborates on how Sessions and others at the DOJ pushed the family separation policy as a deterrent for illegal immigration, plus they shifted criticism for it towards the Department of Homeland Security. Former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen voted against the policy’s implementation, but later signed a memo putting it into effect.
