Trump administration adopts a border policy previously spurned as inhumane

BY JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS AND MICHAEL D. SHEAR New York Times

WASHINGTON

Almost immediately after President Donald Trump took office, his administration began weighing what for years had been regarded as the nuclear option in the effort to discourage immigrants from unlawfully entering the United States.

Children would be separated from their parents if the families had been apprehended entering the country illegally, John Kelly, then the homeland security secretary, said in March 2017, “in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network.”

For more than a decade, even as illegal immigration levels fell overall, seasonal spikes in unauthorized border crossings had bedeviled U.S. presidents in both political parties, prompting them to cast about for increasingly aggressive ways to discourage migrants from making the trek.

Yet for George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the idea of crying children torn from their parents’ arms was simply too inhumane – and too politically perilous – to embrace as policy, and Trump succumbed to the same reality, publicly dropping the idea after Kelly’s comments touched off a swift backlash.

But advocates inside the administration, most prominently Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, never gave up on the idea. Last month, facing a sharp uptick in illegal border crossings, Trump ordered a new effort to criminally prosecute anyone who crossed the border unlawfully – with few exceptions for parents traveling with their minor children.

And now Trump faces the consequences. With thousands of children detained in makeshift shelters, his spokesmen this past week had to deny accusations that the administration was acting like Nazis. Even evangelical supporters like Franklin Graham said its policy was disgraceful.

Among those who have professed objections to the policy is the president himself, who despite his tough rhetoric on immigration and his clear directive to show no mercy in enforcing the law, has searched publicly for someone else to blame for dividing families. He has falsely claimed that Democrats are responsible for the practice. But the kind of pictures so feared by Trump’s predecessors could end up defining a major domestic policy issue of his term.

Inside the Trump administration, current and former officials say, there is considerable unease about the policy. Kirstjen Nielsen, the current homeland security secretary, has clashed privately with Trump over the practice, sometimes inviting furious lectures from the president that have pushed her to the brink of resignation.

But Miller has expressed none of the president’s misgivings. “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” he said during an interview in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry, period.”

The administration’s critics are not buying that explanation. “This is not a zero-tolerance policy, this is a zero-humanity policy, and we can’t let it go on,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.