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WASHINGTON – After a scathing new report from the Justice Department watchdog accusing senior department officials of being the “driving force” of the Trump administration’s 2018 migrant family separation policy, the former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein released a statement of regret on Thursday and current DOJ official Gene Hamilton blamed the president for the policy.
In interviews with the DOJ Inspector General’s office in preparation for the report, Gene Hamilton, known as a close ally to White House adviser Stephen Miller, said the decision to separate the families, a policy known as The name of “zero tolerance” which lasted two months in 2018 before it was terminated by executive order ultimately fell to President Donald Trump and then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
“If Secretary Nielsen and DHS didn’t want to return people with minors, with children, then we wouldn’t have sued them for not having referred them. And in the end, that decision would come back between the Nielsen secretary and president, ”Hamilton told the Office of the Inspector General, according to the report.
Responding to the report, Rosenstein, who left the department in May 2019, said in a statement to NBC News: “Since leaving the department, I’ve often wondered what we should have done differently, and no The problem dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy. It was a failed policy that should never have been proposed or implemented. I wish we had all done better. “
In an April 20, 2018 meeting at the Department of Justice, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Rosenstein, Hamilton and others met with Nielsen, the report said. There, according to Hamilton’s notes, “both the attorney general and the deputy attorney general have expressed their willingness to prosecute adults in family units if DHS makes the decision to refer these people for prosecution.”
Sessions declined 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 on a draft of the report in October.
The report, released Thursday by the Justice Department’s Inspector General more than two years after the policy ended, brings together decisions made by senior Trump administration officials that led to the separation of more than 3,000 families of migrants.
“We concluded that the Department’s unique focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations. », Indicates the report of the Inspector General.
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy has ordered US lawyers to prosecute all adults crossing the southern border illegally – a misdemeanor – whether or not they have children. As a result, border officials were instructed to send the children to health and social care custody while their parents were prosecuted.
According to the report, several US lawyers along the southern border have expressed concerns over whether the migrant parents they were asked to prosecute would be reunited with their children or if some of the children would be too young to be separated.
The then United States Attorney for the West District of Texas, John Bash, communicated with other American attorneys his understanding of the policy based on his instructions from Rosenstein.
“I just spoke with the DAG (Rosenstein.) He said that in accordance with [Attorney General’s] As a policy, we should NOT categorically deny adult immigration prosecutions in family units because of a child’s age, ”according to Bash’s notes in the report.
In a court case on Wednesday, volunteer lawyers tasked with finding the separated families and giving them the opportunity to reunite said they had yet to find the parents of 611 children. Of these, lawyers say, the parents of 392 children have been deported, making them more difficult to find.
The report could provide a roadmap for the new Biden administration to investigate those responsible for a policy that President-elect Joe Biden has called criminal.
Biden pledged to set up a task force to trace the separated families and to conduct “a thorough investigation by the Department of Justice to determine who is responsible and whether the responsibility is criminal or not.”
Biden made the pledge at a press conference last week, noting that his attorney general would ultimately make the decision to prosecute.
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 very deep premeditation and intentionality for all of the effort to separate from the family, regardless of the known harm to parents and children as a result. And a strong belief in the actors here, and other parts of government are assumed, that cruelty was the intention and that it was an acceptable way for the government to operate for four years. “
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