Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan said Wednesday he doesn’t think many in Congress want to change the law to end family separation at the border, and instead want it to remain a problem for political reasons.
“It’s political,” he said on Fox News Wednesday. “Bottom line is, I don’t think Congress wants to fix it. I think there’s a certain segment of folks on the Hill that want this to be an issue.”
He didn’t name any lawmaker or party explicitly, but his comment is a clear criticism of Democrats, who indicated Tuesday they don’t want to pass a law ending family separation. Democrats have instead made it clear they want Trump to back off his border enforcement policy on his own, while Republicans are working on several bills to deal with the issue.
“If they really want families to stay together, make one change,” Homan said, referring to a change that would let U.S. officials hold families as a unit while the adults are prosecuted for illegal entry.
“But they don’t want to fix it. They want it to be an issue,” he said.
Democrats have blasted Trump for family separation, but Trump has said the only legal alternative now is to let illegal immigrants into the U.S. freely, and has said he needs an option to enforce immigration law without breaking up families.
[Related: Trump continues to blame Democrats for splitting families at the border]
Homan stressed that immigrants themselves can avoid family separation by entering a official U.S. checkpoints.
“These parents, they don’t have to be separated,” he said. “They can enter to a port of entry and not be separated. But they made the choice to enter the country illegally, which is a violation of the law.”
He also said most of the children now being detained are those who were sent to the U.S. without their parents.
“Do you know who the vast majority of these children are? They’re not part of a family unit,” he said. “These weren’t children taken away from their parents. These are children that were smuggled into this country by criminal organizations.”
