Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defiantly rebuffed reporters who asked Monday if the Trump administration was deviating from historical practice or ethical conduct by separating children from parents accused of illegal immigration.
“The children are not being used as a pawn,” Nielsen told a reporter from American Urban Radio at the daily White House press briefing as a New York magazine journalist played on loud volume a video of children crying inside a detention center.
[Related: Democrats accuse Trump administration of ‘child abuse’ at the border]
The noise of wailing children played audibly as a CBS News Radio reporter asked Nielsen if children being separated from their parents was an “intended consequence” or “an unintended consequence” of a recently toughened enforcement strategy.
“Are you intending for this to play out as it’s playing out? Are you intending for parents to be separated from their children? Are you intending to send a message?” the CBS reporter asked in a followup.
“I find that offensive. No. Because why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that?” Nielsen said.
Nielsen said repeatedly that some children being detained were taken from adults pretending to be their parents, and that it was “not true” that the Trump administration is the only one to separate children from their parents.
[Kirstjen Nielsen: Obama separated immigrant families too]
“How is this not specifically child abuse?” asked a reporter from CNN.
Nielsen fired back: “The vast, vast majority of children who are in the care of HHS right now — 10,000 of the 12,000 — were sent here alone by their parents, that’s when they were separated. Somehow we’ve conflated everything.”
In response to a CNN followup about the up to 2,000 children separated from their parents, she said, “I’m not in any position to deal with hearsay.”
The Trump administration recently adopted the policy of default separation of accused illegal immigrant parents from their families. The tougher enforcement is widely seen as a gambit to force legislative action on immigration, and Nielsen urged Congress to act at the Monday briefing.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared a “zero tolerance” enforcement policy in April, meaning that adults accused of illegally entering the U.S. are taken to prison — where their children cannot follow — and criminally prosecuted.
At one point during the White House briefing, Nielsen acknowledged that the Trump administration had made a choice to separate children from their parents, but one she said was mandated by law. A 2016 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit gives little choice, she said.
“If we close the loopholes, we can keep the families together, which is what they did in the last administration until a court ruled they could no longer do that. After 20 days we have to release both unaccompanied children and accompanied children, which means we cannot detain families together — the only option is not to enforce the law at all,” she said.
