Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions told several U.S. attorneys along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 they “need to take away children” as part of an immigration enforcement plan.
The top Justice Department official told the U.S. attorneys who questioned the directive that parents should not have brought their children to the country illegally if they did not want to be separated, according to a draft of a report from the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz that was obtained by the New York Times. Sessions also said that the U.S. “won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”
Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein delivered a similar message to federal prosecutors. He told them that it did not matter how old the children were and that they should be separated from their parents even if they were infants. This message was relayed to members of the district of Western Texas in an email from outgoing U.S. Attorney John Bash.
Bash told his staff that an immigration case involving young children “should not have been declined,” adding, “Per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child.”
According to the draft report, top officials in the department were a “driving force” in the policy to remove children from their parents if they arrived in the country illegally. The report noted that the family separations contributed to the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration.
“The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and effective implementation of the policy, especially with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations,” the draft stated.
Horowitz will likely deliver the finalized version of his report sometime after the election. The report from the New York Times is based on an 86-page draft of the report that featured interviews from 45 officials within the department. Sessions, who left the Justice Department in November 2018, declined to participate in Horowitz’s investigation. Rosenstein’s former office issued a 64-page response to the report and noted that Rosenstein said he “never ordered anyone to prosecute a case.”
Alexa Vance, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said the draft report is not accurate and maintained that the Department of Homeland Security was responsible for the decisions made at the border.
“The draft report relied on for this article contains numerous factual errors and inaccuracies,” Vance said. “While DOJ. is responsible for the prosecutions of defendants, it had no role in tracking or providing custodial care to the children of defendants. Finally, both the timing and misleading content of this leak raise troubling questions about the motivations of those responsible for it.”
