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During the broadcast of "Fox News Sunday" this weekend, former Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, said that during the Obama administration, they detained single children and families.
He argued that at the time it was justified.
WALLACE: Let's look – because you mentioned – how the Obama administration and you, as Secretary of Homeland Security, reacted in 2014 when there was also a spike in children, most not accompanied crossing the border. You started to imprison whole families. In some cases, not much, but in some, you have separated children from their parents in these images that we are putting in place, as of 2014, show pictures of unaccompanied minors in prison-effect situations. Thinking back, did you master it well?
JOHNSON: Well, Chris, without a doubt the images and the reality of 2014 like 2018 are not beautiful. And so, we extended family detention. We had then 34,000 beds for family detention, only 95 out of 34,000 equipped to take care of families. So, we extended it. I gladly admit that it was controversial. We believed that it was necessary at the time. I still believe that it is necessary to name (ph) some capacity for families. We can not release and, during my three years, we have deported or repatriated or returned more than one million people.
But, again, you can handle that at the border. You can try different things. We did not want to go so far as to separate families. But unless we address the underlying causes that motivate people to come here in the first place, we will continue to hit our heads against the wall on this issue.
WALLACE: Very good. Let's look at the problem that President Trump is trying to solve right now. Let's put it on the screen: 40,000 to 50,000 people on the other side of the border, illegally every month. Last month, 9,500 family members crossed the border illegally and up to 40,000 unaccompanied minors cross the border each year.
When I was speaking this week to a senior Trump administration official, himself, and I told him that you were going to be performing, he said: I have a question for Secretary Johnson: what is the democratic solution? How would they cope?
I mean, it's easy to say, well, we have to fix Central America. But go, it's not going to solve the 40,000, 50,000 that arrive each month.
JOHNSON: Good –
WALLACE: Certainly not for soon. How would you handle this flow of people crossing the border now?
JOHNSON: Well, I'll tell you about Jeh Johnson's solution. Continue our security efforts at the border. Give border control, give the immigration authorities the tools they need, but do not go as far as two separate families.
But also continue what Congress started two years ago, help Central America manage property and violence and encourage other countries in the region, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, to develop their own asylum system. .
That's somebody from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops who told me in 2014 that you could not just pad a burning building without offering people another path to safety. . And so, we have to develop these additional ways to get –
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: But, sir, it's not – respectfully, it's not going to solve the problem anytime soon. It will not solve it for months. That would probably not solve it for years if we invested $ 750 million, which we did during the Obama administration in foreign aid in those three countries. These are pretty broken countries.
You have a real crisis at the border with 50,000 people a month, 600,000 people a year crossing the border. How do you stop this? And what is wrong with zero tolerance, the idea that you cross the border, you broke the law, we will pursue you?
JOHNSON: Three things: first, Chris, you're right, there is no easy solution to this problem. And Washington is bad at investing in long-term solutions.
Secondly, history will tell you, lessons learned, lessons learned in 2014, you can do some things that will lower the illegal migration in the short term as we did in 2014, but then the trends to long term always come back to form. The numbers always go back.
President Trump himself saw that in 2017, the numbers dropped dramatically and then they are up again. And so, you can do these things, but we must make long-term investment in the treatment of illegal migration in general. And if we do not do that, we will continue to have this problem.
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