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After reportedly saying that he was open to officially reinstating large-scale family separation at the southern border, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan is now telling NBC News that the administration is “not pursuing that approach,” claiming that “the president has been clear that family separation is not on the table.” But there’s a catch, because of course.
”Really a better system, as I've said many times, would allow us to detain families together,” McAleenan continued. As DHS Watch has noted, the administration has floated a “proposed regulation to remove legal prohibitions on indefinite detention of children which would result in a massive increase in indefinite incarceration of families seeking asylum.”
“If the proposed regulation is finalized and implemented,” DHS Watch continues, “the result would be incarceration of families seeking asylum as they indefinitely await decisions on their cases in the immigration courts, a process that could take months or even years given the increasing court backlog.”
Really, the future of family separation at the southern border probably isn’t in McAleenan’s hands, at least not with White House aide and white supremacist Stephen Miller around. Miller, the architect of the administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies, has outlasted two confirmed DHS secretaries, John Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, and was reportedly a driving force behind the ouster of the latter. In this administration, his word has oftentimes been the final word.
Only time will tell what happens here, but McAleenan’s words don’t seem to hold much weight, considering that Donald Trump acts impulsively and on a whim, and that he’s often driven not by what department heads suggest to him, but instead by what shadow department head Miller tells him.