Category: Immigration Act of 1924

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Trump cabinet officials voted in 2018 White House meeting to separate migrant children, say officials

“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” said Trump adviser Stephen Miller, say officials present at a White House meeting.

by Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff | NBC NEWS

WASHINGTON — In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president’s most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there.

Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, led the meeting and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

It had been nearly a month since then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had launched the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, announcing that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay.

Those invited included Sessions, Nielsen, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to documents obtained by NBC News.

Nielsen told those at the meeting that there were simply not enough resources at DHS, nor at the other agencies that would be involved, to be able to separate parents, prosecute them for crossing the border and return them to their children in a timely manner, according to the two officials who were present. Without a swift process, the children would enter into the custody of Health and Human Services, which was already operating at near capacity.

Two officials involved in the planning of zero tolerance said the Justice Department acknowledged on multiple occasions that U.S. attorneys would not be able to prosecute all parents expeditiously, so sending children to HHS was the most likely outcome.

As Nielsen had said repeatedly to other officials in the weeks leading up to the meeting, according to two former officials, the process could get messy and children could get lost in an already clogged system.

Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct, but as a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.

While “zero tolerance” ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents, what Miller proposed would have separated an additional 25,000, including those who legally presented themselves at a port of entry seeking asylum, according to Customs and Border Protection data from May and June 2018.

That plan never came to fruition, in large part because DHS officials had argued it would grind the immigration process to a halt. But after Sessions’ announcement that all families entering illegally would be prosecuted, the onus had fallen on DHS to act.

At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.

“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” said Miller, according to the two officials. It was not unusual for Miller to make claims like this, but this time he was adamant that the policy move forward, regardless of arguments about resources and logistics.

No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument regarding immigration “fell on deaf ears” inside the White House, said one of the officials.

“Miller was tired of hearing about logistical problems,” said one of the officials. “It was just, ‘Let’s move forward and staff will figure this out.'”

Frustrated, Miller accused Nielsen of stalling and then demanded a show of hands. Who was in favor of moving forward, he asked?

A sea of hands went up. Nielsen kept hers down. It was clear she had been outvoted, according to the officials.

In the days immediately following the meeting, Nielsen had a conversation with then-CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan inside her office at the Ronald Reagan Building, and then signed a memo instructing DHS personnel to prosecute all migrants crossing the border illegally, including parents arriving with their children.

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Read the rest of the report, detailing the full extent of this outrageous, illegal, and immoral conduct by corrupt high-level officials of our Government, at the link. This is what your tax dollars have been used for, while legitimate needs like coronavirus testing, disaster relief (see, Iowa), mail delivery, naturalization services, unemployment relief, etc., go unmet!

So, separated families and children continue to suffer, much of the harm and trauma irreparable and life-defining. This “policy” was so clearly illegal and unconstitutional that DOJ attorneys conceded its unconstitutionality in Federal Court. 

However, in an ethics-free DOJ, those same lawyers falsely claimed that there was no such policy. Rudimentary “due diligence” on their part, required by professional ethics, would have revealed that their representations on behalf of corrupt institutional “clients” were false.

The article also confirms the complicity of Kevin “Big Mac  With Lies” McAleenan in gross, intentional human rights violations. Courtside exposed “Big Mac” long ago! 

While the victims continue to suffer, Miller, Sessions, Nielsen, Big Mac, and other cowards who planned and carried out these “crimes against humanity,” directed at some of the most vulnerable humans in the world, remain at large. Some, like Miller, actually remain on the “public dole.” Likely, so do the DOJ lawyers who unprofessionally defended and helped obscure this misconduct in Federal Court.

It’s also worth examining the role of U.S. Magistrate Judges and U.S. District Judges along the southern border, most of whom turned a blind eye to the transparent racial and political motives, not to mention the grotesque misallocation of public resources, driving Sessions’s “zero tolerance” misdirection of scarce prosecutorial resources from serious felonies to minor immigration prosecutions. 

As I’ve been saying, “Better Federal Judges for a better America!” And, better Federal Judges start with removal of the Trump regime as well as the ousting of “Moscow Mitch” and the GOP from Senate control. 

Will there ever be accountability? Our national soul and future might depend on the answer!

Had enough wanton cruelty, neo-Nazism, corruption, illegality, immorality, cowardice, lies, false narratives, racism, stupidity, and squandering of tax dollars on nativist schemes and gimmicks? Get motivated and take action to get our nation back on track to being that “City upon a Hill” that the rest of the world used to admire and respect!

This November, vote like your life and the very future of humanity depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

08-21-20