Trump said that ending the practice of ripping kids from their parents at the border was a 'disaster.'
The Trump administration's cruel practice of ripping children from their families at the border caused a major outcry from Americans, the vast majority of whom did not support the barbaric policy.
But Trump has no qualms about his treatment of vulnerable children, telling Fox Business News on Sunday that he thinks ending the policy — which he was forced to do by the federal courts — was a mistake.
"Now you don’t get separated, and while that sounds nice and all, what happens is you have literally you have 10 times as many families coming up because they’re not going to be separated from their children," Trump said in an interview with Fox host Maria Bartiromo that aired on Sunday. "It’s a disaster."
Trump reportedly wants to bring back the practice of family separations, a policy that experts say traumatizes children and that federal courts have ruled violates U.S. laws. Courts have demanded that the Trump administration return the children it stole back to their parents, a process the administration claims might take years given, how poorly U.S. officials tracked the separations.
In fact, Trump wants to find ways to make the family separation policy even more cruel, by jailing the kids the government rips from their parents for longer periods of time.
And because even some of the worst people in his administration wouldn't follow those orders, Trump began a purge of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border protection, and put one of his most racist advisers, Stephen Miller, "in charge" of immigration.
Trump went on to blatantly lie about how the family separation policy worked in his interview with Bartiromo.
"When they used to separate children, which was done during the Obama administration, with Bush, with us, with everybody, far fewer people would come," Trump said.
Of course, that is a complete lie. Neither former President Barack Obama nor former President George W. Bush had a systemic practice of forcibly separating families that the border, choosing only to separate them when officials thought the safety of the child was at risk.
But Trump uses that lie as justification for wanting to bring back the policy — again lying about how the separations were a good deterrent.
"You have ten times as many people coming up with their families," Trump said. "It’s like Disneyland now."
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
