Washington, D.C. — Last night, a new report from The New York Times confirmed that the Trump administration’s former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, were a “driving force” behind the president’s child separation policy, arguing that they “need[ed] to take away the children” regardless of their age or the traumatic consequences of these policies on children. This is in addition to a report that broke over the weekend finding that Vice President Mike Pence overruled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and ordered that the borders close in March, despite scientists saying that there was no evidence that this would slow the spread of the coronavirus. The action has so far caused nearly 150,000 children and adults to be expelled from the country.
In response, Philip E. Wolgin, managing director of Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, issued the following statement:
Every single time we think that the story of the Trump administration’s horrific policy of family separation could not get worse, it does. The New York Times report is further evidence that the cruelty of this administration knows no bounds, and it confirms what we’ve known for years: that the administration knowingly and willfully pursued a policy of taking children as young as toddlers from their parents, regardless of the consequences and without a plan for how to reunite the families it ripped apart. And the news that Vice President Pence put his administration’s anti-immigrant agenda in front of science to overrule even its own CDC is all the more evidence that Trump and his allies will always put their nativist, racist, and anti-family agenda ahead of the needs of the nation. This newest reminder of the horrors of family separation should be on the minds of every American.
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