A senior Trump administration official who previously led the Department of Homeland Security testified before Congress that the idea of restarting family separations at the southern border should not be off the table if former President Donald Trump wins a second term in office next year.
Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill Thursday that “all options should be on the table” when deciding which immigration policies would be considered.
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Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA), were outraged by Wolf’s response. The family separations unfolded for several weeks in 2018 after DHS chose to refer adult illegal immigrants for prosecution, which resulted in having to detain the parent in jail and separate the minor child.
“Mr. Wolf, you’re one of the key architects of the Trump administration’s efforts to separate families at the border. Children as young as 4 months were mercilessly taken from their parents, with almost 1,000 children still not reunited with their families years later even though the Biden administration set up a task force to reunite them,” Castro said during his questioning. “What you did is unimaginable, unimaginable, inhumane, and despicable.
“We’re having an important debate about immigration in the Congress and for the presidency, so I’d like to ask you an important question. I’d like a yes or no answer,” Castro added. “Would you advise this or a future administration to once again separate families as the Trump administration did?”
Wolf reaffirmed an answer he previously provided outside of the hearing.
“I’ll stand by my statement that you, I think, quoted earlier that all options should be on the table, but what I would say is that there are a number of effective programs, including [Migrant Protection Protocols] and others that I’m sure we’ll talk about that address the situation along that border, and the crisis that we faced in ’18 is very different than the crisis that we face today,” Wolf said.
“So that means that you do think that it should be considered and possibly used?” Castro said.
“That’s not my response,” Wolf said.
Dean took up the issue again minutes later.
“Nothing’s off the table? The separation of children under the previous administration that you were a primary architect of — not off the table in the future?” Dean asked.
“What I said earlier was that I think there are a number of different policies and programs that we put in place after 2018,” Wolf said.
“Mr. Wolf, I own the time,” Dean said. “Answer the question as posed.”
“I’ve answered that several times,” Wolf said. “All options should be on the table when you’re trying to find solutions to a problem.”
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One Republican, Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), berated her Democratic colleagues for attacking the former Cabinet official and said Democrats chose to focus on the past instead of tens of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children that the federal government has lost track of after releasing them to adult sponsors in the United States.
“We’re talking about 1,000 children. We’re talking about a period of time of three to four weeks,” Wagner said. “We have an administration now that has lost 85[,000] to 100,000 children to cartels and trafficking and gangs and sex exploitation, and it’s just incompatible to me.”
