Trump's 'Zero Tolerance' Border Policy Was Pushed Aggressively by Jeff Sessions, Despite Warnings, Justice Department Review Finds

By Nick Miroff and Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post

14 January 21

 

he Trump administration and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions barreled forward with their “zero tolerance” border crackdown in 2018 knowing that the policy would separate migrant children from their parents and despite warnings that the government was ill-prepared to deal with the consequences, according to a long-awaited report issued Thursday by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General.

The report called the Justice Department and the attorney general’s office a “driving force” in making sure the Department of Homeland Security aggressively increased the prosecution of adults arriving with children, findings that cast doubt on statements made by Sessions that the government “never really intended” to separate families.

“DOJ officials were aware of many of these challenges prior to issuing the zero tolerance policy, but they did not attempt to address them until after the policy was issued,” the report states.

The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal entities have issued internal reports assessing the failings of the zero-tolerance effort, but the Justice Department report provides new details about Sessions’s aggressive role in pushing the crackdown, despite numerous red flags.

The Justice Department’s “single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations,” it said.

Gene Hamilton, a former Homeland Security official who became a top aide to Sessions, told the inspector general that he wrote the zero-tolerance policy memo at the attorney general’s behest following a meeting at the White House, according to the report. At the time, President Trump was agitated about “caravans” of Central American families streaming to the U.S.-Mexico border.

During the crackdown, the government took more than 5,000 children from their parents, placing them in government shelters while adults were jailed. Some of the mothers and fathers were deported while their children remained in government custody, and in the ensuing chaos, the government had no functional plan to reunite the families.

Once the policy was underway, Sessions at one point told U.S. attorneys along the border that “we need to take children away,” according to the report, even as the Trump administration publicly claimed that it did not have a policy that called for separating families.

More than two years later, attorneys representing the families have been unable to contact more than 500 of the parents whose children were taken. Some of those minors remain in the United States with relatives.

Trump administration officials say the government has been working to reunite the families but has found in some cases that the parents do not want to regain custody of their children, allowing them to remain in the United States.

Sessions declined to be interviewed for the report by the inspector general’s office. Rod J. Rosenstein, who served as Sessions’s deputy attorney general, expressed contrition in a statement issued Thursday through a spokesman. “My Department of Justice colleagues and I faced unprecedented challenges unlike any I had experienced while serving as a U.S. Attorney under Presidents Bush and Obama,” he said.

“Since leaving the Department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy,” the statement said. “It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better.”

According to the inspector general report, “Department leadership and, in particular, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG), which had primary responsibility for the policy’s development, failed to effectively prepare for, or manage, the implementation of the zero tolerance policy.”

The report found that the Justice Department directed U.S. attorney offices to significantly increase family prosecutions without the resources they needed to bring the cases or deal with the logistical effects of a prosecution surge that jammed courtrooms and immigration jails along the border.

The Justice Department was aware of potential problems but proceeded anyway, and did not adequately coordinate with U.S. attorney’s offices, even as concerns mounted, according to the findings. DOJ at times seemed to play down its responsibility.

For example, Rosenstein said at the time, “I just don’t see that as a DOJ equity,” when asked about inadequate care for children taken from their parents.

Rosenstein also at times boasted about how the policy was implemented. “I mean, I think it’s unlikely that ever in American history has there been more coordination about enforcement,” he said, according to the report.

Kirstjen Nielsen, who was Department of Homeland Security secretary at the time, was initially tasked with announcing the crackdown, but DHS suddenly withdrew her from a news event “to protect Secretary Nielsen from bearing the wrath of the policy.” That left Sessions — who was a vigorous backer anyway — to do it.

The report recommended that DOJ improve its coordination and that the U.S. Marshals Service work with the Department of Health and Human Services so children could communicate with their families better.