Like Gidley and others from the White House, Conway argued that the administration’s decision to refer all illegal border-crossers for criminal prosecution – and thereby forcing the separation of families – amounted to nothing more than upholding the law.
The barrage of media appearances by Trump administration officials and spokespeople on the issue of family separations appears to have done little to stem the tide of criticism from lawmakers of both parties that has flooded the White House this week.
President Donald Trump’s aides are struggling to defend their talking points on the furor over the administration’s practice of separating families who enter the U.S. illegally, with officials and spokespeople engaging in heated exchanges with little backing from congressional Republicans.
As the outcry has grown over the family separations, Trump officials have dug in on blaming Democrats for the controversy, on insisting that they’re simply enforcing the law, and on claiming that they’re not using the emotional debate to extract concessions on Trump’s border wall and other priorities.
But they’ve faced fierce blowback during interviews and press briefings, and fact checks have piled up discrediting the Trump administration’s justifications.
In an interview with NPR Tuesday morning, deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley laid particular blame for the situation on the nation’s southern border on Democrats, the minority party in both houses of Congress.
“The buck stops with the people who make the laws in this country, and that’s Congress,” Gidley told NPR. Trump, Gidley argued, has put forward a comprehensive immigration reform plan that offers more to Democrats, in some cases, than what former President Barack Obama proposed.
But throughout his interview, Gidley was met by pushback from his interviewer, who repeatedly circled back to press the White House spokesman on why the Trump administration has continued this policy when it is squarely within its power to end it.
Throughout, Gidley insisted that the Trump administration was simply upholding the law, which he said mandates the family separations, and that to follow the protocol of past administrations would be to continue violating the law.
In fact, the decision to refer all illegal border-crossers for criminal prosecution – and thereby separate families who enter the U.S. illegally – was a “zero tolerance” policy announced this spring by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that could just as quickly be rescinded.
Gidley closed the contentious back-and-forth by declaring that “I hate the situation, but it’s got to be fixed by Congress.”
Some fellow Republicans, however, are hitting back at that stance, with Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Shelley Moore Capito and others saying that it is within the Trump administration’s power to stop separating families.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen also faced intense questioning when she appeared at the White House press briefing late Monday.
In one exchange, Nielsen was challenged on the idea that the Trump administration is using the family separation outcry as leverage in the larger immigration debate.
“Now, are these kids being used as pawns for a wall? Many people are asking that. And Democrats are saying this is your discretion and there is no law that says that this White House can separate parents from their children,” a reporter asked Nielsen, prompting the homeland security secretary to dodge and shift attention on to violent criminals crossing the border. “The kids are being used by pawns by the smugglers and the traffickers,” she replied.
And when pressed about whether the administration was separating families at the border for the deterrent, Nielsen bristled.
“I find that offensive. No. Because why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that?” she replied, even though Sessions and White House chief of staff John Kelly have both previously described the family separation policy as a deterrent.
Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway sparred more directly Monday night with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, growing indignant and asking the host “how dare you?” as he posited that “you changed a policy to impress your base [and] you got a pop in the polls with them.”
Like Gidley and others from the White House, Conway argued that the administration’s decision to refer all illegal border-crossers for criminal prosecution – and thereby forcing the separation of families – amounted to nothing more than upholding the law.
“We’ve all said it: Nobody likes it,” she said. “However, nobody also likes people coming and smuggling children. It is a huge enterprise.”
Sessions found himself on much friendlier ground Monday night, interviewed by conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham, where he insisted that the Trump administration is “doing the right thing” and stayed away from blaming Democrats for the separation policy. The separated children, he said, are held “in good conditions” by the Department of Health and Human Services.
It is far from the first time that White House spokespeople have struggled to defend an administration decision or policy. Former press secretary Sean Spicer famously berated reporters during a 2017 press briefing for referring to the president’s restrictions on travel into the U.S. by people from certain majority-Muslim nations as a “travel ban” even though both he himself and Trump had used the term.
And multiple White House spokespeople stumbled in May 2017 while explaining the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey, at first offering that the dismissal had come at the recommendation of deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein only to have the president later say that he had made up his mind to fire Comey before talking to the deputy attorney general.
Even with significant turnover since then within the White House communications team, a consistent explanation of Comey’s firing has continued to elude Trump’s spokespeople to this day.
The barrage of media appearances by Trump administration officials and spokespeople on the issue of family separations appears to have done little to stem the tide of criticism from lawmakers of both parties that has flooded the White House this week.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), currently away from Washington as he undergoes cancer treatment, wrote on Twitter that the administration’s separation policy “is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded.”
McCain joined a long list of GOP lawmakers, including Sens. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) who have spoken out against the practice of separating families.
Jeh Johnson, a secretary of homeland security under Obama, called the policy “immoral and un-American” in a Washington Post op-ed. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, known for regularly adopting conservative positions, called the practice “morally unacceptable and politically unsustainable.”
And on Monday, a bipartisan group of 75 former U.S. attorneys published a letter to Sessions, arguing that the administration’s policy not only traumatizes children but also robs current U.S. attorneys on the border of the agency they need to prioritize prosecutions by mandating criminal referrals for all illegal border crossings.
“It is time for you to announce that this policy was ill-conceived and that its consequences and cost are too drastic, too inhumane, and flatly inconsistent with the mission and values of the United States Department of Justice,” the former U.S. attorneys wrote to the attorney general. “It is time for you to end it. Effective leadership and the integrity of the world’s leading law enforcement agency require nothing less.”
But Trump has shown no signs of backing down.
“We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally,” Trump tweeted on Monday morning. “Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2000 are with their parents, many of whom have tried to enter our Country illegally on numerous occasions.”
He continued in a second tweet, “#CHANGETHELAWS Now is the best opportunity ever for Congress to change the ridiculous and obsolete laws on immigration. Get it done, always keeping in mind that we must have strong border security.”
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