Show me where children were jailed along with their purported parents anywhere else in this nation.
President Donald Trump's senior adviser Stephen Miller led the meeting, and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
It had been nearly a month since Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, had launched the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, announcing that
every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun
separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay.
As Nielsen had said repeatedly to other officials in the weeks leading up to the meeting, according to two former officials, the process could get messy and
children could get lost in an already clogged system.
Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct but as
a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.
While
zero tolerance ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents, what Miller proposed would have separated 25,000 more, including those who legally presented themselves at ports of entry seeking asylum, according to Customs and Border Protection data from May and June 2018.
"If we don't enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it," said Trump adviser Stephen Miller, according to officials present at a White House meeting.
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