President Trump said Tuesday that he is not planning to reintroduce the policy of family separations at the U.S. border with Mexico.
“We are not looking to do that, no,” Trump said, when asked by reporters in the Oval Office.
But the president also suggested that family separations could be an effective deterrent to illegal immigrants and that more migrants come to the border when separations are not used.
“When you don’t do it, it brings a lot more people to the border,” Trump said.
Trump reportedly has been considering resuming family separations, placing pressure on members of his administration to use the policy. According to reports, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen pushed back against family separations, which played a role in Trump’s decision to fire her.
Both Trump and Nielsen were heavily criticized for the child separation policy.
Trump also said Tuesday that President Barack Obama had begun the family separation policy, while he himself ended it.
“Obama separated the children, by the way,” the president said. “Just so you understand. President Obama separated the children. Those cages that were shown — I think they were very inappropriate. They were built by President Obama’s administration, not by Trump.”
Trump added that he was the one who “changed the law.”
The president also blasted Democrats for their failure to fix problematic immigration laws.
“We are bucking really bad things in Congress, with the Democrats in Congress not willing to act,” he said. “They want to have open borders, which means they want to have crime. They want to have drugs pouring into our country. They don’t want to act.”
Trump said the U.S. has the worst immigration laws of any country in the world.
“I mean, I could sit here and name them,” he said. “But if you get rid of catch-and-release, chain migration, visa lottery. You have to fix the asylum situation. It’s ridiculous.”
