SAN DIEGO – Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance on Friday made a policy move for the first time in Donald Trump’s presidency — refusing to rule out the use of family separations, even if they are Homeland Security officials, if he and the former president win back the White House. did they are currently working to reunite more than 1000 children with their families.
“When the media says a family is separated, look — every time you’re arrested for a crime, that’s a family being separated,” Vance told NBC News during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If a boy commits gun violence and is taken to prison, that’s a family separation, of course it’s tragic for the kids, but you have to prosecute the perpetrators and enforce the law,” he said. “Real family separation politics is when you don’t enforce the border like Kamala Harris refused.”
The Trump campaign has put border security at the forefront of its messaging, taking much of the fire at President Joe Biden’s administration for managing the southern border despite illegal crossings. In June, it fell to the lowest number of Biden’s term.
In a televised town hall in May 2023, Trump declined to say whether he would back away from the separation policy, despite describing it as “tough.”
“Well, when you have these policies, people don’t come,” Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in the early weeks of his 2024 presidential bid.
“If the family hears that they will be separated, they love their family. They don’t come,” he continued. When pressed publicly on whether he would roll back the practice, Trump replied: “We’ve got to save our country, right?”
In a recent interview with NBC News during a visit to the border in Arizona, Trump said, “there will be provisionsbut we have to get the criminals out,” on whether plans for mass deportations of undocumented migrants – a hallmark of the 2024 campaign – would result in family separation.
More than 5,000 families were separated under the former president’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy in 2018, but because the Trump administration did not record which children were separated and where they were sent, the task force and attorneys working on their behalf have separated families. it is a difficult time to define families to give them a chance to reunite.
According to a report by the Department of Homeland Security published this yearthere are still 1,360 children from “confirmed reunification.”
Now, with a second Trump administration likely to expand, some children affected by the practice are speaking out about their experiences in a social media campaign launched before the November election and backed by immigration advocacy groups including FWD. to us.
Billy, one of the teenagers reflected in the project who did not give his last name, said in a filmed clip how he was separated from his father after crossing the border, leaving with little agency or information.
“I couldn’t speak English. I could do nothing but sit and watch as my father was taken from me, during the process he was told he would “never see his family again”. By his count, he was reunited with his father 30 days after he was taken across the border to New York.
“I hope,” said Billy, “that no one has done what happened to me again.”
Another teenager, who did not want to be named, described a similar situation in a separate post. He said he was privately transferred to New York and was only allowed to see his father after a week in jail, despite having intermittent contact with family members for a month. .
“I’m telling this story now because we can’t continue to have the same problem,” he said. “We must end family separation now and forever,” he said.
Vice President Kamala Harris, for her part, said she would bring back the bipartisan border security bill It failed in the Senate earlier this year after Trump urged congressional Republicans to stall negotiations. The compromise bill — despite being one of the most conservative border security bills in modern U.S. history — did not go so far as to require family separation. As a senator — and later as a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate — Harris opposed the practice, describing the separations as “punitive” and lacking a “humanitarian approach.”