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Trump Officials, Moving to Break Up Migrant Families, Blame Democrats

A Honduran mother and her children turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents along the United States border with Mexico in February.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Trying to turn the tables politically on President Trump’s own immigration policy, administration officials on Tuesday defended new measures they are taking to separate children from migrant parents who cross the United States’ southern border without authorization, blaming the situation on Democrats who have bitterly denounced it.

Top officials from the White House, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security argued that a series of court rulings and laws that existed when Mr. Trump took office had essentially given them no choice but to carry out a policy that many human rights groups have condemned as inhumane.

The officials said it was Democrats, who have opposed Mr. Trump’s efforts to impose stricter immigration policies, who were forcing them to use the bare-knuckle tactics.

“A nation cannot have a principle that there will be no civil or criminal immigration enforcement for somebody traveling with a child,” Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser for policy and an architect of the president’s immigration agenda, said during a conference call with journalists.

“The current immigration and border crisis, and all of the attendant concerns it raises, are the exclusive product of loopholes,” Mr. Miller added, “that Democrats refuse to close.”

The argument appeared devised to undergird the message from the president himself over the weekend, when he placed the child separation policy at the feet of his political opponents.

In a Twitter post on Saturday, Mr. Trump wrote, “Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.”

There is, in fact, no such law. A 1997 court settlement sharply limits the amount of time families can be held in detention by immigration authorities when they are encountered at the border.

Spurred on by the president, Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month announced a “zero tolerance” policy in which people who cross the border illegally are to be subject to criminal prosecution. On Tuesday, the administration officials argued that the two directives, taken together, essentially left them with no option other than to take children from their parents at the border.

Democrats have rejected Mr. Trump’s attempts to blame them for the policy.

“Your administration made the policy change to separate children from their parents,” Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, said in a tweet on Saturday that was addressed to the president. “If you don’t have the courage to own up to it, then reverse it. Disgraceful & weak to blame others for your own evil policy.”

Devin O’Malley, a Justice Department spokesman, said on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s election served as a mandate “to restore legality to the Southwest border.”

“The attorney general has been very clear that this rule of law is simple, that aliens who illegally enter the United States will be criminally prosecuted,” Mr. O’Malley said. “They will not be given a free pass, and that is irrespective of whether or not they have brought a child with them.”

Immigrant advocacy groups dismissed the Trump administration’s rationale as a lie being used as a pretext to enact a barbaric policy.

“Deliberately separating children from parents to sow fear in parents as a deterrence is unprecedented and beyond cruel,” Ur Jaddou, the director of DHS Watch at America’s Voice, said in a statement, calling the separation policy “an abomination.”

“Trump must stop lying to the public and end this barbaric policy,” Ms. Jaddou said. “There are no ‘loopholes’ nor statutory requirements that children be ripped from their parents’ arms as a matter of routine practice.”

The American Psychological Association, a professional health organization, warned that the policy would have harmful, long-term psychological effects.

“The administration’s policy of separating children from their families as they attempt to cross into the United States without documentation is not only needless and cruel, it threatens the mental and physical health of both the children and their caregivers,” said Jessica Henderson Daniel, president of the association.

The Trump administration’s attempts to push back against criticism of its immigration policies followed days of confusion and outrage on social media over the plans to separate children from their parents at the border.

Last month, a top official from the Department of Health and Human Services told Congress that the agency had lost track of more than 1,500 immigrant children, mostly from Central America. Those children had arrived at the Southwest border alone, without their parents, and were later placed with sponsors.

The new public backlash, including hashtags like #WhereAreTheChildren, conflated those cases with claims that hundreds of children were being taken from their parents at the border and then lost in government bureaucracy. Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary at the department’s Administration for Children and Families, called those claims “inaccurate.”

“There’s no reason to believe that anything has happened to the kids,” Mr. Wagner said, adding that the figures pertain to cases in which a follow-up call by a federal official to ascertain a child’s well-being was not answered. “If you call a friend and they don’t answer the phone, you don’t assume that they are missing.”

Administration officials insist that the new zero-tolerance policy that, in some cases, separates children from families seeks to protect them from human smuggling rings. In many cases, officials said, migrant children have been coached on what to say to make fraudulent claims for asylum.

Immigration advocates have fought those claims, saying the administration is using the threat of separating families to deter immigration to the United States.

“It’s a purposeful attempt to harm children for a political objective,” said David W. Leopold, who oversees the immigration law group at Ulmer & Berne.

Congress has yet to address proposals that would allow families to remain together in detention centers. Already, the government lacks enough detention space for all undocumented immigrants who have been apprehended, many of whom are released until their cases can be heard in court.

Mr. Sessions said he has dispatched 35 additional prosecutors and 18 immigration judges to the Southwest border region to help handle expanding caseloads.

Under current law, any person who illegally enters the United States can be prosecuted; penalties are stiffened if they try to return after being deported. In most cases, though, first-time offenders are simply put into civil deportation proceedings.

Under Mr. Sessions’s zero-tolerance policy, all people who illegally cross the border would be referred for prosecution. Most immigration experts say it is unlikely that the administration would be able to reach its goal of 100 percent prosecutions.

Still, officials at the Department of Homeland Security have been ordered to significantly increase the number of people referred for criminal prosecution. Last month, nearly 10,000 people traveling in families were apprehended at the border, and almost 50,000 have been arrested since October, the start of the fiscal year.

After a lull last year, the number of women and children making the perilous journey from Central America to the United States has sharply increased. Many are fleeing gangs, which often try to recruit the children. Honduras, the source of many of the migrants, has one of the world’s highest murder rates.

The number of border apprehensions totaled 50,924 in April, compared with 15,766 the same month in 2017. But this year’s data point was roughly the same as that of April 2016, suggesting that 2017 was an outlier.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: On Separating Families at Border, Trump Officials Blame Democrats. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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