Facing an avalanche of outrage, President Donald Trump on Wednesday caved and signed an executive order ending his policy of taking migrant children away from their parents at the border“We want security for our country.
The Republicans want security and insist on security for our country, and we will have that and keep families together. It’s very important. I’ll be signing something in a little while that’s going to do that,“ Trump said at the White House. The president’s stunning about-face came after a week during which he insisted that only Congress could put an end to his policy. The order would expand the time that minors could be held in custody, which would allow families to remain together. But critics charge it could also mean that the kids would be kept in custody far longer than they can be held now.
The announcement was the first time Trump acknowledged the reality that he could use his presidential pen to reverse at least parts of his immigration policy. The president acknowledged that images of detained children made it difficult to maintain his policy in the face of mounting international criticism.“Those images affect everybody. But I have to say, you have double standards. You have people that want absolute security and safety, and you have people that do look at the children and then you have people like me, and I think most of the people in this room, that want both,” he said. Pressed last Friday on action over families being separated at the border, Trump said, “We can’t do it through an executive order.”The president, during a meeting with top GOP lawmakers and other officials, excoriated Democrats, repeating without evidence his charge that they want open borders and that the US would be “overrun” by “millions of people.”“They would like to have open borders where anybody in the world can just flow in, including from the Middle East, from anybody, anywhere, they can just flow into our country. Tremendous problems with that. The tremendous crime caused by that,” he said.“We don’t want people coming in from the Middle East through our border using children to get through the line. We don’t want that.”Trump also said he would cancel Thursday’s traditional annual congressional picnic because lawmakers were too busy to take an afternoon off. The commander-in-chief also accused human traffickers of using children as a free pass to enter the country.“They’re using their children and always they’re using the children as a ticket to getting into the country. We have to remember that. There’s a number of the 12,000 children, 2,000 are with the parents, and 10,000 came up with some really horrible people in some cases,” he said.“You have the coyotes, you have the traffickers, the human traffickers, not only drug traffickers but the human traffickers. They use these children as passports to get into the country. So we have to work on that, too.”And he blamed his predecessors in the Oval Office for not fixing the nation’s immigration system.“This has been going on for 50 years, longer. This has been going on under President Obama, under President [George W.] Bush. This has been going on for many, many years. We’ll see if we can solve it. This is not something that happened just now,” he said. Trump has said in the past that he would back either of two House bills that would also extend the time that immigrant children can be held after they cross the border illegally with their parents.