President Trump’s view that surging family separations at the U.S. border are a valuable negotiating tool is likely to be challenged when he meets with House Republicans on Tuesday to discuss competing immigration bills, including one that aims to end the practice of removing minors from their parents’ custody while they face prosecution for illegal entry.
Most members expect the emotionally charged issue to be brought up during Tuesday’s meeting, according to a House GOP aide closely involved in immigration talks. Depending on the president’s response, Republicans could emerge breathing a sigh of relief of increasingly worried about their party’s prospects in November.
[White House: Democrats are turning family separation into an ’emotional issue’ for midterm advantage]
The president and his aides spent much of Monday accusing Democrats of grandstanding on the immigration issue, claiming they’ve demonstrated zero desire to reform current immigration laws, improve border security, and prevent more migrant children from being placed into government-run facilities apart from their families. Less than 24 hours after first lady Melania Trump urged “both sides of the aisle” to address the worsening problem in a rare policy statement on Sunday, her husband told a crowded East Room that Democrats need to “sit down instead of obstructing” and work with the GOP to negotiate a bill that can pass the lower chamber and attract support in the Senate.
“Instead of the Democrats spending all of this time in the detention centers holding these press conferences, they should make sure they support these bills,” White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp said in a television appearance ahead of the president’s comments.
It’s this approach that has worried congressional Republicans, particularly those facing tough re-election races where images of separated children and the makeshift facilities in which they are being placed could repel voters and increase chances of a Democratic wave. A Quinnipiac poll released Monday showed 67 percent of voters oppose separating families while detaining illegal immigrants, versus 27 percent who support the current policy. However, 55 percent of self-identified Republican voters endorse the policy.
“The president is very good at imagery. He’s a television star. He understands that this is not good for him. It’s not good for the Congress if we want to win the midterms,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told CNN, adding that the optics of family separations are “atrocious.”
Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, who plans to attend Tuesday’s meeting, suggested in an interview with NPR on Monday that those defending the administration’s zero tolerance policy for its national security implications have wrongly mixed in family separations, which “[are] not preventing terrorists or drugs from coming into this country.”
Homeland Security Department officials told reporters last week that nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families after crossing illegally into the U.S. between mid-April and the end of last month. Without a swift legislative fix or unilateral action by Trump, the practice is likely to continue into the fall, giving Democrats ample time to cut political ads suggesting Republicans sat idly by as detained children went days without their parents.
[Also read: Trump administration could be holding 30,000 border kids by August, officials say]
Immigration experts have also pointed to the surge in unaccompanied minors crossing the border as a parallel problem for the administration that grew out of its zero-tolerance policy. Between April and May, after the policy first opened the door to large-scale family separations, the number of unaccompanied minors crossing into the U.S. illegally grew by roughly 20 percent.
“The fact that they went up is a side-effect of this policy,” Leon Fresco, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation under the Obama administration, told the Washington Examiner. “To the extent that parents thought they could get more safety by coming with their kids, now that they’re seeing how this policy is playing out, the kids will be sent on their own.”
Nearly 400 unaccompanied children entered the U.S. last weekend alone, according to figures provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for placing them in the care of sponsors, foster families, or temporary shelters.
Senior White House officials, including chief of staff John Kelly, have previously described family separation as a tool to deter prospective illegal immigrants from crossing into the U.S.
“I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America to getting on this very, very dangerous network that brings them up through Mexico into the United States,” Kelly, then-Homeland Security secretary, told CNN in March 2017 when asked about separating children from their parents.
He added: “In order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network, I am considering exactly that. They will be well-cared for while we deal with their parents.”
Trump not only sees the policy as a deterrent, but he has told Republicans he believes it can be used in congressional negotiations to secure greater border security guarantees and substantial changes to the legal immigration system, according to a source close to the White House. The president told Fox News last week that he “hate[s] the children being taken away” from their parents at the border.
But his administration continued to dismiss claims on Monday that he alone can direct immigration officials not to separate families when they arrive in the U.S. illegally, opening the door to a potential standoff when he meets with the House GOP conference. That attitude prompted Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, who chairs the congressional Republican campaign operation, to issue a stern message to Trump on social media.
“I am writing a letter to understand the current policies and to ask the Administration to stop needlessly separating children from their parents. If the policy is not changed, I will support other means to stop the unnecessary separation of children from their parents,” Stivers wrote on Facebook.
But even if Trump agrees during Tuesday’s meeting to a solo fix or the legislation put forward by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., which already contains a provision to end family separations, some still say there is little in the way of ensuring his administration actually halts the practice of detaining illegal immigrant families, either separately or together.
“The fatal flaw is that the bill the House has proposed is, in good faith, aimed at resolving the issue of family separation, but in a world where there is no trust and no faith they don’t solve it because the administration could re-permit family detentions,” Fresco said. “Unless we actually get a piece of paper signed by the president that says ‘I am no longer going to do this,’ people are going to presume that the administration will continue doing this.”
