Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions concedes migrant children not swiftly being reunited with their families was a “very unfortunate” result of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.
Sessions, who served as attorney general from February 2017 until his ouster in November 2018, expressed regret for the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration strategy that led to the charging of illegal immigrants, jailing them, and placing their children into shelters.
He told Reuters on Tuesday that migrants “shouldn’t be given immunity” just because they are traveling with children but noted that the treatment of those children was less than ideal.
“It was unfortunate, very unfortunate, that somehow the government was not able to manage those children in a way that they could be reunited properly,” Sessions said. “It turned out to be more of a problem than I think any of us imagined it would be.”
The stringent immigration policy, which was announced by Sessions in April 2018, faced backlash after the share of migrant children separated from their families for more than 100 days jumped from less than 10% at the end of 2016 to some 38% in 2018. Former President Donald Trump signed an executive order essentially reversing the policy in June of that year.
“I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” Trump told reporters while he signed the order.
A Justice Department audit released in January found that Sessions knew that migrant families at the border would be separated as a result of implementing the 2018 policy but moved forward with the plan anyway.
“The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact that prosecution of family unit adults and family separations would have on children traveling with them and the government’s ability to later reunite the children with their parents,” the report reads.
Two years after the “zero-tolerance” immigration strategy was nixed, hundreds of children are reportedly still waiting to be reunited with their families.
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Sessions, who resigned at the former president’s request, went on to run for his old U.S. Senate seat in Alabama during the 2020 election. He was defeated in a primary runoff by GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who received Trump’s endorsement.
