Name: Jeff Sessions was ‘driving force’ behind family separations, DOJ finds
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Jeff Sessions was ‘driving force’ behind family separations, DOJ finds

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NEW!1,538sharesFormer Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his top advisors were the “driving force” to push for family separations at the U.S. southern border, a scathing report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General revealed Thursday.The report’s release comes two and a half years after the Trump administration initiated its “zero tolerance” policy ordering migrant parents crossing the border with children detained and charged. The policy led to family separations, with children kept away from their relatives.The investigation finds the Justice Department “failed to effectively prepare for, or manage, the implementation of the zero tolerance policy.”“The Department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact,” the 93-page report concluded.Under President Donald Trump’s policy, more than 2,800 families were separated in 2018, according to lawyers appointed by a federal judge. As of October, the government had still not been able to track down the parents of 545 separated children. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security admitted that some of those parents are believed to have already been deported.The separations marked a grim chapter in U.S. immigration history, as images of children in cages made front-page news around the world, and advocates accused the Trump administration of turning its back on vulnerable migrants, many fleeing violence and extreme poverty back home.In an interview, Gene Hamilton—a current Justice Department official— told the Office of Inspector General that he blamed the president’s office for the implementation of the policy. If former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen hadn’t wanted to target parents, “we wouldn’t have prosecuted them,” he said.“Ultimately that decision would be between Secretary Nielsen and the president,” Hamilton told investigators.According to the report, Sessions and his advisors ignored dire warning signs from a 2017 child separation pilot program in western Texas, failing to heed advice about widespread problems that arose.“We have now heard of us taking breast feeding defendant moms away from their infants,” one prosecutor wrote. “I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log and saw the fact we had accepted prosecution on (sic) moms with one and two-year-olds.”The report also shows how U.S. attorneys’ offices across the southwest border area repeatedly told Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and their top advisors that they were not prepared to handle the surge in cases against parents arriving with children.Sessions ignored their pleas during a May 2018 call: “We need to take away children,” he said, according to the report.Investigators noted in the report that Sessions — who no longer works for the U.S. government— refused various requests for interviews. The Miami Herald reached out to Sessions and Hamilton on Thursday but did not immediately hear back.The report cites an email from another high-ranking official, Rosenstein, defending the policy after the U.S. Attorney’s Office refused to separate families.“We should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child,” he wrote.In a response to the Herald via email, Rosenstein said he regretted the choices made.“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. It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better,” he said.According to the inspector general’s office, the agency found no evidence Justice Department leaders engaged in discussions with other key federal offices before enacting the policy.The report shows Sessions, Hamilton, and other advisors believed that parents would be prosecuted rapidly and reunited within one to three days. When U.S. attorneys informed them parents were remaining in custody for up to a week or longer, they refused to change directives.Also revealed: U.S. Marshals Service officials warned Justice Department leadership that child separations would hinder the agency’s ability to conduct other operations throughout the country, while also resulting in $277 budget shortfall and a shortage of 3,000 beds, which took place.In a joint statement, the Congressional Oversight and Judiciary Committee Chairs called the contents of the report a “dark chapter in our history [that] must never be repeated.”“Today’s report sheds new light on the chaos, cruelty, and reckless disregard for vulnerable children in our nation’s custody,” the statement said.In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit seeking to reunite an asylum-seeking mother and her 7-year-old daughter fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, only to be separated from each other in the U.S. and detained separately, 2,000 miles apart.“The barbaric family separation practice was immoral and illegal. At a minimum, Justice Department lawyers should have known the latter. This new report shows just how far the Trump administration was willing to go to destroy these families,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney on the case. “The Biden-Harris administration will inherit the legacy of family separation, and we don’t doubt that more horrific details will continue to emerge.”___(c)2021 Miami HeraldVisit Miami Herald at Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.

NEW!1,538sharesFormer Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his top advisors were the “driving force” to push for family separations at the U.S. southern border, a scathing report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General revealed Thursday.The report’s release comes two and a half years after the Trump administration initiated its “zero tolerance” policy ordering migrant parents crossing the border with children detained and charged. The policy led to family separations, with children kept away from their relatives.The investigation finds the Justice Department...

Jeff Sessions was ‘driving force’ behind family separations, DOJ finds

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