For weeks now, we’ve been hearing about the travails of the White House communications team: That they’re hemorrhaging employees, that the administration isn’t too concerned with hiring replacements, that morale is plummeting to all-time lows. Which might help explain the PR disaster the administration has blundered into with its new “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which has led to the separation of nearly 2,500 children from their parents to date at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Even by the standards of a Trump scandal, this one is a five-alarm fire: Families of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers alike have been torn apart after being vacuumed up by law enforcement, with children sent to detention centers and parents tossed in jail pending a court date. The reports from the ground curdle the blood: Parents told their children are being taken away for a bath, then informed they won’t see them again. Shell-shocked children clustered in chain-link pens at overcrowded “shelters.” Parents deported without knowing where their kids are or how they might be reunited. Developmental psychologists warning that the separations amounted to emotional torture for the children involved.
At issue is the Trump administration’s decision, announced in May, to criminally prosecute all adult illegal immigrants apprehended at the border, which ended the previous policy of releasing families pending their date in court rather than split the parents from the children. When the stories broke into the public eye, the backlash, as any PR hack could have predicted, was swift and decisive. Yet the Trump administration, which had had two full months to prepare their defense of the new policy, seemed to be taken completely by surprise. The initial responses ranged from nonsensical—Trump’s reflexive blame of “Democrat laws” and the protestations of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen that “we do not have a policy of separating families at the border”—to ghoulish, as when a smirking Jeff Sessions chided the migrant children whose lives he had upended for running afoul of Paul’s admonition that the law is a terror to evildoers in Romans 13.
“I’ll say it very honestly and I’ll say it very straight,” Trump told reporters Monday. “Immigration is the fault, and all of the problems that we’re having… It’s, very strongly, the Democrats’ fault. They’re obstructing. They’re really obstructionists.”
“The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” Trump added. “It won’t be. If you look at what’s happening in Europe, if you look at what’s happening in other places, we can’t allow that to happen to the United States—not on my watch.”
Meanwhile, his administration continues to toss children into “refugee holding facilities” on his orders. Even some of the president’s staunches defenders are growing uncomfortable about the optics.
The Trump administration will not win on this one and it should reverse course today.
— Bill O'Reilly (@BillOReilly) June 18, 2018
It has fallen almost entirely to outside groups to explain the complicating factors surrounding family separations: at National Review last week, Rich Lowry pointed out that the policy is intended to discourage asylum seekers from entering the country illegally and insisted that the solution was for Congress to “appropriate more money for family shelters at the border.”
“Despite some mixed messages,” Lowry insists, “If the administration had its druthers, family units would be kept together and their cases settled quickly.”
But we’ve heard precious little about those “druthers” from the administration itself. Rather than propose a legislative plan to prevent family separations in advance of the “zero tolerance” change, the White House made the change, with full knowledge that it would result in these separations, with practically no fanfare last month—and began calling for a congressional fix only after nearly 2,000 children had already been torn from their parents’ arms. All the while, they have continued to insist that, in Nielsen’s words, “illegal actions have and must have consequences” and that “we will not apologize for the job we do.” Now, with Congress scrambling to provide an immediate solution, federal immigration officers continue to break up new families ever day.
President Trump thrives on chaos, and his administration has always been a sloppy outfit. This has caused a number of unforced errors for the White House over the last year. But not until now has it resulted in the state-sanctioned torture of thousands of innocent kids.
