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- A new Justice Department report directly implicated President Donald Trump in the zero-tolerance family separation policy on the US-Mexico border.
- Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from the policy that deprived children of their migrant parents.
- In late October, lawyers for the ACLU said the parents of 545 children could not be located.
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
President Donald Trump and senior White House aides have “aggressively” pushed for the policies that led to the separation of children from their immigrant parents at the border, a new Justice Department report.
Gene Hamilton, a senior official wrote in the report that the policy was adopted after complaints from Trump and others to the White House.
“The attorney general was aware of the White House’s desires for further action related to the fight against illegal immigration,” Hamilton said in the report.
Hamilton said former Attorney General Jeff Sessions felt he needed to act quickly on the matter. The sessions then asked Hamilton to draft a memo that would put in place a zero tolerance approach to immigration control at the border, “April 3, 2018.
In October 2020, a draft report by the Department’s Inspector General found that Sessions and other senior Justice Department officials were “a driving force” behind US-Mexico border policy.
The draft report, based on Michael Horowitz’s investigation of the “zero tolerance” policy, said Sessions and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called for the separation of children from parents, regardless of their status. age.
The New York Times reported that based on notes from two separate interviews with Sessions and Rosenstein, law enforcement officials were pushing for a policy based on pressure from Trump.
In a May 11, 2018 meeting, Sessions told prosecutors that Trump was “very intense, very focused” on the border issue, The Times reported.
Sessions also told prosecutors: “We have to take children.”
Rosenstein did not respond to Insider’s request for comment at time of publication, but told The Times he regrets his role.
“Since leaving the department, I have often wondered what we should have done differently, and no question has dominated my thinking more than the 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 October draft report, Rosenstein reportedly doubled Sessions’ order for prosecutors to take children.
He told prosecutors they should not have refused to pursue two cases because the children were very young, The Times reported.
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The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy has led to the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
The women who were breastfeeding said immigration officials separated them from their babies at the border. In October, The Times reported that the draft report appeared to confirm this, with a prosecutor writing: “I didn’t believe it until I looked at the service log.”
In a court file sent in late October 2020, attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union said they could not find the parents of 545 separated migrant children due to Trump administration policies. They added that they believed “about two-thirds” of these parents were deported without their children.
On several occasions, Trump and other administration officials have attempted to distance themselves from politics. The president even claimed at one point that the Democrats were behind the policy.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
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