Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday offered a full-throated defense of the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border, saying that having kids does not give migrants immunity from prosecution — and found justification for his policies in the Bible.
Sessions — who last month announced a “zero tolerance policy” to criminally prosecute people crossing the border illegally — made his latest remarks in a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, telling the group that the migrant families were to blame for their own break-ups and that his department’s separation of families was not “unusual or unjustified.”
“If you cross the Southwest border unlawfully, then the Department of Homeland Security will arrest you and the Department of Justice will prosecute you. That is what the law calls for — and that is what we are going to do,” Sessions said. “Having children does not give you immunity from arrest and prosecution.”
“However, we are not sending children to jail with their parents,” he said, adding that the policy “can result in short-term separation.”
“Noncitizens who cross our borders unlawfully, between our ports of entry, with children are not an exception,” the attorney general said. “They are the ones who broke the law, they are the ones who endangered their own children on their trek. The United States, on the other hand, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect them while the parents go through a short detention period.”
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