Leading Democrats from the Senate and House Judiciary Committees are demanding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hand over an unredacted copy of the internal memo Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen most assuredly signed authorizing state-sanctioned kidnaping at the southern border as official United States immigration policy.
”On June 17th, you tweeted, ‘We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,’” Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and Congress member Jerrold Nadler of New York wrote in their October 11 letter to Nielsen. “However, it has come to our attention that there was an internal memo on April 23rd recommending the implementation of a family separation policy that went to your office.”
A redacted copy of this memo was obtained by Open the Government and the Project On Government Oversight late last month, which stated that DHS could “permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.”
“To support that conclusion,” Feinstein and Nadler continue in their letter, “a footnote stated a full legal analysis of the family separation option was attached. The versions of this memo that are publicly available are heavily redacted or unsigned. The legal analysis justifying family separation included as an attachment to the memo is currently unavailable to the public.”
While the signature on the redacted memo is blacked out, Open the Government and the Project On Government Oversight believe it was “almost certainly Nielsen’s, given that the memo is addressed to her.” Yet Nielsen has flat-out lied, repeatedly, about the family separation policy, with a complicit, Republican Congress refusing to hold her accountable.
This comes, as Feinstein and Nadler note, as Trump is floating resurrecting the family separation policy, both as an election strategy and because his white supremacist advisers enjoy it. But even as officials float officially reviving this humanitarian crisis, dozens of migrant children kidnapped from their parents at the border continue to remain under U.S. custody.
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