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For the first time, a senior Trump administration official who helped implement family separation condemned the sweeping immigration policy, which has allowed the government to take more than 3,000 children, including infants , to their parents at the US-Mexico border in 2018..
In response to a damning report released Thursday by the Department of Justice’s internal watchdog on the “zero tolerance” policy that made family separation possible, former Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said the policy “should never have been proposed or implemented”. .
The long-awaited report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) said departmental leadership knew the policy would lead to the separation of children from their families and that former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions “a demonstrates insufficient understanding of the legal requirements for the care and custody of separated children ”.
“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. The report says.
The OIG said that Justice Department leadership “had not effectively coordinated” with relevant agencies before implementing zero tolerance, although it was aware of the challenges created by the increase in prosecutions against adult asylum seekers as part of the policy.
During a conference call in May 2018, Sessions told prosecutors: “We need to bring children,” according to notes taken by those in attendance and provided to the OIG.
Rosenstein, who spoke out against the policy publicly for the first time on Thursday, told the OIG he knew the zero-tolerance policy would lead to family separations. He also told investigators that he was not involved in shaping the policy and that he had received assurances about it that he now thought he was wrong.
In July 2020, the Guardian reported that Rosenstein made comments during a conference call with U.S. attorneys tasked with implementing the policy which in effect meant that no child is too young to be separated from their parents. .
The appeal came after U.S. lawyers on the southwest border repeatedly raised concerns about how zero tolerance was supposed to be enforced. A month after the policy was put in place, to assist lawyers, a list of questions was drafted for DHS and HHS which included, “How does DHS treat infants?”
By that time, it was clear that no agency had a master list of separated children.
In a statement delivered to the Guardian on Thursday, Rosenstein said he and his colleagues at the Department of Justice “faced unprecedented challenges” from the work he had done as a US lawyer under previous presidential administrations. .
“Since leaving the department, I have often wondered what we should have done differently, and no problem has dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy,” Rosenstein said. “It was a failed policy that should never have been proposed or implemented. I wish we had all done better.
Sessions, who resigned in November 2018, announced the zero tolerance policy in April 2018. Facing intense domestic and international pressure, the Trump administration ended massive family separations in June 2018, though families Asylum seekers continue to be separated today on a smaller scale. .
The separation from the family, which legal experts and doctors have called torture, has been supported by several federal agencies.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) separated families at the border and detained the parents, the health department ultimately took custody of the children separated from their parents, and the leadership of the justice department provided the legal framework which made the separations possible.
The Justice Department’s OIG report confirms earlier monitoring reports by auditors from other agencies, which found inadequate monitoring systems in place.
A January 2019 report from the OIG Health Department found that the Trump administration could have separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border for up to a year before family separation was an issue. publicly known practice.
Lead attorney in an ongoing family separation lawsuit filed by the United States Civil Liberties Union, Lee Gelernt, said: “This new report shows how far the Trump administration was prepared to go. destroy these families. Just when you think the Trump administration can’t sink any lower, it does.
“The Biden-Harris administration will inherit the legacy of family separation, and we have no doubt more gruesome details will continue to emerge,” Gelernt said. “We need them to act urgently – every day without action it is harder to find and reunite families.”
Dick Durbin, a U.S. Democratic senator from Illinois, has said he will hold Justice Department officials accountable as the new chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. “Those who planned and executed the zero tolerance policy will have to live knowing that their cruelty and cowardice are responsible for the scars these children will bear for the rest of their lives,” Durbin said.
Despite being the driving force behind the zero tolerance policy, Sessions declined to be interviewed by OIG investigators.
According to the report, Sessions told US lawyers on the southwest border that families would be swiftly prosecuted and reunited, even if this was, “in most cases, a practical and legal impossibility.”
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has repeatedly defended her decision to implement the zero tolerance policy, announced in April 2018.
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