\n\n“Trump administration officials have repeatedly denied that they pursued a policy of intentionally separating immigrant families arriving at the southern border in 2018 \u2014 depicting the separation of parents from their children as a side effect of a \u201czero tolerance\u201d policy of prosecuting all border crossers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A new draft report from a government watchdog obtained by the New York Times<\/a> shows they were lying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe need to take away children,\u201d then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions reportedly told five US attorneys on the border during a meeting in May 2018 (to the lawyers\u2019 alarm), adding that if parents care about their children, they shouldn\u2019t bring them to the US in order to seek \u201camnesty.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “While former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has largely taken the blame for the policy publicly, it turns out that Sessions and his deputy Rod Rosenstein were much more directly involved in pushing for family separations than previously known.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Rosenstein also emphasized the policy, telling the US attorneys that no children were too young to be separated from their parents. One of the prosecutors, John Bash, decided not to prosecute two cases involving families in which the children were just babies, and Rosenstein told him he should have gone ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bash later told his staff that the cases should not have been declined: \u201cPer the A.G.\u2019s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child,\u201d he said.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n ” for the duration of the zero-tolerance policy, prosecutors actually had a harder time enforcing the law in serious felony cases because they were overwhelmed in trying to prosecute every person who crossed the border without authorization. According to the report, a Texas prosecutor informed the DOJ in 2018 that \u201csex offenders\u201d were consequently freed from custody. The US Marshals Service was also unprepared for the implementation of the zero-tolerance policy, meaning that it had to divert resources from serving warrants in other cases, the report said.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Senior Trump administration officials, including Nielsen, have repeatedly denied that they pursued a policy of family separation”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n