Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate defends Trump family separation policy
“We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are, in fact, a family. We have to do our job. We will not apologize for doing our job,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Monday at a National Sheriffs Association event.
“Don’t believe the press. They are very well taken care of,” she said of children separated from their parents at the border.
Here are photos of undocumented immigrant children at a U.S. Border Patrol processing center in McAllen, Texas. Photos provided by Customs and Border Patrol. pic.twitter.com/l7kEvwWrWM
— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) June 17, 2018
Barletta is a staunch supporter of Trump and has echoed his rhetoric on immigration. Barletta served as mayor of Hazleton, a small coal-mining town in rural Pennsylvania, where he pushed for a 2006 law to crack down on unauthorized immigrants; a federal court found the measure unconstitutional in 2010. As a U.S. representative, he later spearheaded opposition in Congress to a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform effort.
In his interview on Friday, Barletta argued that the separation of children from their parents on the border serves as a deterrent to unauthorized immigrants.
“Remember, why people come to the country illegally is because we’re not enforcing the laws. So if people knew when they came here what would happen, we would not have this situation,” he said.
Casey spokesman Max Steele blasted Barletta for his comments about the policy, accusing him of “defending the indefensible.”
“Congressman Barletta is embracing this inhumane policy of separating children from their parents because he is an ideological extremist and one of President Trump’s most loyal lapdogs,” Steele said in a statement on Monday.
Other Republicans, meanwhile, had more critical words for the Trump administration’s policy on family separation.
“Family separation is wicked,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said in a statement. “The administration’s decision to separate families is a new, discretionary choice. Anyone saying that their hands are tied or that the only conceivable way to fix the problem of catch-and-release is to rip families apart is flat wrong.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
