Trump’s Family Separation Policy Aims To Deter Immigration. That May Make It Illegal.
You won’t hear Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen call this “deterrence.”
The aim of President Donald Trump’s new policy of splitting kids from their mothers at the border is, in a word, deterrence: The White House wants to discourage more immigrants from trying to enter the United States.
Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, is careful not to say this outright — she dodged a direct question on the subject from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) at a hearing last month.
There’s a reason Nielsen and other administration officials shy away from attaching the word “deterrence” to the new policy: Changing immigrant detention policy as a way to deter undocumented people from coming to the U.S. is illegal, federal courts have repeatedly ruled. So now she and other Trump administration officials find themselves struggling to defend a family separation policy whose clear ambition is deterrence.
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The Department of Homeland Security was considering separating children from their parents “in order to deter” undocumented immigration, White House chief of staff John Kelly told CNN while serving as Nielsen’s predecessor last year. And Gene Hamilton, a former aide to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, asked participants at a meeting last August on the policy to “generate paperwork laying out everything we could do to deter immigrants from coming to the U.S. illegally,” according to The New Yorker.