The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Signs Order To End Family Separations

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

President Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday to end his controversial policy that has resulted in thousands of family separations and brought criticism from Democrats and Republicans. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Scott Horsley, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Allie calling from my chemistry classroom in Ukiah, California, where I have just finished washing the very last beaker before summer vacation. This podcast was recorded at 345 Eastern on Wednesday, June 20th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. President Trump has signed an executive order to reverse his own administration's policy of separating immigrant parents and children when they cross the border illegally.

We're going to have strong, very strong borders, but we're going to keep the families together. I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. A lot to keep track of over a relatively short period of time. So let's just jump into it. Scott, Trump has signed an executive order to reverse a border policy that his own administration put in place.

The reasons for putting this in place and the dynamics have changed a lot according to their telling. But can you just refresh us on what the administration chose to do and how this has played out over the last few days? Well, the administration chose to prosecute aggressively everyone who crossed the border illegally. And in the case of families, that meant separating children, some toddlers, infants from their parents. It's that last part that they're now backtracking on. The order that the president signed just a short time ago says it is now the administration policy to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources. So they're still going to prosecute people,

but they're going to keep the families together while they do that. And they're directing the Pentagon to work with the Homeland Security Department to put up these families awaiting prosecution on military facilities. And of course, over the last few days, as criticism has grown, the Trump administration, from the president to Homeland Security Secretary Kristen Nielsen, had said, this is out of their hands. They can't do anything. Only Congress can fix it. Mara, they're reversing course. They're reversing course and they're admitting that everything they said about this policy

and how their hands were tied was false. The president said it was the Democrats' fault that he did this. Only Congress could reverse it, which is a complete departure from his famous statement, I alone can fix it. But Congress pushed back. They said, nope, you can fix it. And now he has done something that is pretty rare for Donald Trump. He's capitulated. He's made a tactical retreat. And he kind of negotiated with himself, called his own bluff, and then threw in his hand because he was hoping to use this as leverage to get a bigger immigration bill. He did the same thing with the Dreamers when he

removed the deportation relief that certain young people who had been brought here illegally had. He was hoping to force Congress to fix that and give him some other things he wanted on immigration. That hasn't worked either. So none of these gambits have worked. I would say right now, for political competence, the White House gets pretty bad grades. You know, the president's pursued the same tack on the trade front, where he sets up a situation that's very antagonistic to the people on the other side of the table, expects them to capitulate. So he'll stop doing whatever he was doing that was annoying them,

whether it's tariffs or separating families. And the other sides have basically said, no, we're not going to reward you by giving you something you want in order to stop doing something you shouldn't be doing to start with. So, Mara, Trump was getting a ton of criticism on this, obviously from Democrats, but from a lot of Republicans as well, who just weren't comfortable with this, just in terms of their own personal view or the political angles of this. Thirteen Senate Republicans sent him a letter last night.

They actually sent it to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. But it said, Although enforcing our immigration laws is an essential responsibility of the federal government, it must be done in a way that is consistent with our values and ordinary human decency. They went on to say the immediate cause of this crisis is your department's decision to enforce this policy. So Trump was getting all this criticism, but we've seen over and over again that he and top aide Stephen Miller, he's one of President Trump's top advisors, and he is a real longtime hardline voice on immigration going back to when he worked for Jeff Sessions when Sessions was a senator. And others in the administration think that hardline immigration tactics are good politics. So why the sudden reversal?

Well, that's a really good question because he has used immigration and other culture war issues like kneeling athletes on the campaign trail, and he's pushed really hard on it. And Stephen Miller has said very openly he thinks that this is something that's going to work for the administration when it comes to being for a strong border or against it. He says we win that 90-10. But this got the kind of backlash that I don't think the administration was prepared for. You just read from that letter. Here's something from the Utah lieutenant governor, Spencer Cox. We have to assume he's a Republican. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yes, he is.

This was an incredible tweet. Can't sleep tonight. I know I shouldn't tweet, but I'm angry and sad. I hate what we've become. My wife wants to go and hold babies and read to lonely, scared, sad kids. I want to punch someone. Political tribalism is stupid. It sucks and it's dangerous. Now, look, Donald Trump has chosen political tribalism and he's been very successful at it. He hasn't necessarily expanded his base, but he's got his base more and more energized and excited about him. And that's what he was hoping to do in these midterm elections, even at the cost of energizing Democrats against him. That is his stock and trade. Division is his stock and trade. This is how he started his campaign. Immigration was his bedrock or issue. He came down the escalator and talked about Mexicans sending rapists over the border. And even earlier this week, in a pretty fiery speech to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Scott, Trump was saying, hey, remember I made that statement at the beginning of my campaign. I was right. He was all about the hardline stance just 24 hours ago. And as he's talked about this policy,

he just slides effortlessly from discussing Central American refugees into talking about MS-13 gang members. And they could be from the Middle East. These immigrants could be from the Middle East. Got to get terrorists in there somehow. We're having a lot of problems with Democrats. They don't want to vote for anything. They don't care about lack of security. They really would like to have open borders where anybody in the world could just flow in, including from the Middle East, from anybody, anywhere, they can just flow into our country. Tremendous problems with that, tremendous crime caused by that. We're just not going to do it. Let's say for Donald Trump, for Stephen Miller, for Jeff Sessions, the cruelty

of this policy was not a bug. It was a feature. This was designed to be a deterrent to illegal immigration, and administration officials acknowledge that. But let's take a listen to what Vice President Pence had to say today when the president backtracked on this policy. I think what the president's made clear is we believe it's a false choice between whether we are a country of law and order, a country with borders, and a country that demonstrates the compassion and the heart of the American people in respect for families. And what's interesting about that is that false choice is exactly what Donald Trump has been presenting the American people with for the last several weeks when he's talked about this policy as being the only solution between wide open borders,

let everybody in, and tough immigration enforcement. Now the administration has acknowledged, no, you can have tough immigration enforcement and also a humane policy. He wanted credit for being tough on the border, but he didn't want to take responsibility for the unpopular result of that policy, which was separating kids. And the thing that was so interesting when he kept on saying, we have no choice, we have to do this. In fact, prosecutors have a lot of discretion. It's called prosecutorial discretion. And there are 11 million people in this country illegally. If the government pursued a zero tolerance toward them, the way they're pursuing it on the border, that would mean that they would be out there rounding up people here in this country illegally and deporting them. But they don't. They prioritize.

They decide to go after people who have certain kinds of criminal records. So this was a choice by the administration. They wanted it to be a deterrent. I will say this about Jeff Sessions, Steve Miller, and even Kirstjen Nielsen and John Kelly. They all had the courage of their convictions. They were intellectually honest. They said, we are going to do this. We want to deter people from coming. We're telling them loud and clear, you come here, you're going to be separated from your children. Only Donald Trump tried to pretend that he wasn't doing that, and he just couldn't take responsibility for his own policy. This was all supposed to be, according to Stephen Miller, leverage for Donald Trump to get the kind of comprehensive immigration reform bill he wanted in Congress. So, Scott, what is happening on Capitol Hill right now?

A couple of different things are happening on the Hill where I am right now, Mara. And let's start with the Senate side. On the Senate side, you are seeing pushes from both parties to pass some sort of bill addressing this issue and clarifying that families cannot be separated. That does not mean it's a bipartisan approach. All 49 Democrats have signed on to one broad bill from California Senator Dianne Feinstein that makes a little bit of a political point saying you can't do this and you certainly can't do this for political reasons. On the Republican side, there's a couple different efforts that are coalescing, but by and large, they all do the same thing. They change the language that bars the federal government from detaining minors for more

than 20 days so that families could be housed together in detention facilities. And they also steer more resources so that the court system can go through these cases faster. In some cases, that's more judges. In some cases, that's money to boost housing for these families. It was interesting. President Trump had been calling on Congress to fix this issue. Ted Cruz started that process and his bill mentioned more judges. And then Trump went yesterday and ridiculed the idea, saying we don't need more judges. We need more security. Well, what happened to the other bills that were supposed to be in Congress this week that were supposed to get to a solution for the dreamers? Well, for that, Mara, you've got to walk

down the long hallway over to the House of Representatives, where there's a totally separate track going on. And what's interesting is when you ask the Senate Republicans, well, are you going to wait for the House to pass this bill and add your language in? They actually smirked. Tom Cotton smirked at that idea because they do not believe the House is going to pass this bill. So what's going on on the House side is that House Republicans are going to call to the floor tomorrow two different broad immigration bills. One's a pretty hard line measure that does a lot of the conservative things, really cracks down on the legal immigration process as well. A lot of money for border security. The other looks a little bit like some of the broader bills that we were talking about earlier this year to provide permanent status for people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also have a lot of money for border security and make changes to legal immigration policy. Those are all the things that President

Trump wants in an immigration bill. And we've repeatedly seen that when you put all those things in one bill, it has nowhere near enough votes to pass. And, you know, the big question hanging over this entire episode, and it was quite a dramatic episode, the kind of spark that this lit in the public was really something, a wildfire, actually. But what does this do to the November elections? This was the issue Donald Trump thought was going to be great for him. Democrats clearly feel emboldened. You had a ton of Democratic representatives going down to the border to try to get into these facilities to call attention to it. So who comes out of he said, look, I think being tough on immigration is going to be a great issue for Republicans. It probably is a good issue for Republicans in Senate races, which are going to be decided in mostly red states that Donald Trump carried and remains very popular in.

But the contested House races are largely in suburban districts where there's a lot of vulnerable Republicans. And we heard one of those Republicans on All Things Considered yesterday, Mike Kaufman of Colorado, saying, you know, this is political malpractice to be putting Republican representatives on the hook for this kind of policy. And wit airs, the Republican pollster said, I don't think suburban women are going to like the idea of pulling babies away from their mothers. And other Republicans have said that Republican members of the things that they see as outrages that the Trump administration does are things that I think are hard for voters to comprehend or keep in their mind or the things that bother them but don't seem to affect their daily lives, right? Like the

Twitter feed, you can argue, is not going to have a direct effect on your day-to-day life in a lot of cases. But I think this is one of those things where people saw the pictures of that crying little girl. They heard that gripping, really disturbing audio that ProPublica obtained of kids just hours after they'd been separated from their parents. And I think that sticks with you in a way that the latest in the Stormy Daniels scandal does not.

And we should say that NPR has not yet independently verified that audio. Well, yeah. And to be fair, I don't think Democrats were thinking they were going to run on Stormy Daniels. But the big question is, how long does this last? One thing I will give Donald Trump credit for, he made a tactical retreat. He did this before we started seeing pictures of toddlers and infants. That was going to be the next iteration of this because there were all of these, what is it called, tender age facilities that were being set up for the really little children. So I give him, you know, he did something smart politically there. But what we don't know is how long this outrage is going to last. It really struck a chord across a very wide bipartisan swath of people in America.

But just like the school shootings, you know, next week, week after, if it's not in the news, will people still be affected by it? We don't know. And we're talking about the political angle here because we are the politics podcast. But just to shift back to the logistics of this, this is not a done deal, right? Like the president signed this order, but there were more than 2,000 children who were separated from their parents. There's a question of how long they will continue to be separated for. There's a question of the logistics of reunifying these families. There's a lot still going on here that has not been anywhere near resolved. The question for the Trump administration is how effectively have they moved this off the lead of the evening news and off the front page of the newspaper?

Or is this going to continue to percolate as they actually try to carry out this plan now of keeping families together even as they pursue tough prosecution? You raise a good question. What happens to the 2,000 plus young people who've already been taken from their families? Are they quickly reunited and under what circumstances? And is there a court challenge? Under a legal settlement, children can only be held for up to 21 days. So the first time one of these young people who's reunited with their family is held over that period. Will this be back in the courts and how will the administration deal with that? And the last short term question I have is, you know, we've talked how the president veers back and forth between the different ways he talks about immigration and he doesn't want to be held responsible for some of these images and scenes.

But at the same time, he talks on a very hard line. Most listeners will know the answer to this question. But in a couple hours from when we're recording, the president is holding that campaign rally in Minnesota. I really want to hear how he frames this, how he talks about it, which President Trump shows up to talk about immigration there. We're going to call it a day now. We're certainly going to keep talking about the bigger picture of this story in our weekly roundup tomorrow. But for now, I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the White House. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Support for NPR Politics and the following message come from Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. Rocket Mortgage gives you confidence when it comes to buying a home or refinancing your existing home loan.

Rocket Mortgage is simple, allowing you to fully understand all the details and be confident you're getting the right mortgage. To get started, go to rocketmortgage.com slash NPR politics. Equal housing lender licensed in all 50 states. NMLSconsumeraccess.org number 3030.