Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump:
"If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday at a law enforcement conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. "If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border."
Administration officials explained that the goal of the program is 100 percent prosecution of all who enter the U.S. illegally. When adults are prosecuted and jailed, their children will be separated from them, just as would happen for a U.S. citizen convicted and jailed.
Anguish at Southwest border as more immigrant children are separated from parents
The Trump administration's willingness to take children from their parents has raised concerns about how far authorities should go to stem unauthorized border crossings and what human cost is acceptable in the name of border security and immigration control.
"There is something terrible happening here that Americans would not support if they understood it," said F. Scott McCown, director of the Children’s Rights Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.
I don't care how much you hate illegal immigrants this is EVIL. You are punishing the children. It's abhorrant and wrong and inexcusable. I hope they rot in hell for this. 700 children so far have been seperated from the only family they know and lost to our often incompetent and mismanaged child care system. I fail to see how any parent could support actions like these.
When parents are held for prosecution, their children are turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The children are then designated as "unaccompanied minors," and the government tries to connect them to family members who are already in the U.S. Until then, children wait in shelters or are sent to federally contracted foster homes, often without parents being told exactly where they are, immigration advocates said.
It may soon become even more difficult to place children with relatives. The Department of Homeland Security is proposing immigration checks be done on all people in a household who may take in these "unaccompanied" children, which means relatives who are undocumented may be less likely to come forward.
In the meantime, space in shelters and foster homes is limited; The Washington Post reported the administration plans to open facilities at military bases to house some of the separated children.