For months, Trump appointee Scott Lloyd has been able to fly under the radar and escape the public scrutiny other administration officials have faced over the family separation policy, despite the fact that he once headed the office that was tasked with caring for children stolen from families at the southern border. That changed yesterday.
Lloyd was a primary witness at Tuesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, where he and other officials said that, while they knew or were made aware of the harmful effects family separation has on kids, they never took those concerns to others in the administration. MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff, among the loudest voices exposing this humanitarian crisis, called his admission “remarkable.” “Even though he was warned there would be irreparable harm done to the children that were separated [from] their parents, he never kicked it up the food chain,” he said during an MSNBC appearance Wednesday. “He never took it to the White House, he never talked about it with anybody at DHS or DOJ, he just said, ‘yup, we took it under advisement, I heard it,’ he never shared it with anybody.”
Soboroff said Lloyd won’t be the only top Trump official to come under scrutiny of newly empowered House Democrats. “The question is how far did this go? Who else knew? We haven’t heard from Kirstjen Nielsen yet.” Under subpoena threat, Nielsen has finally agreed to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee next month. The Homeland Security secretary could also be facing an FBI investigation for lying to Congress.
Just as importantly, Soboroff noted that family separation remains a crisis. “We’ve got to remember, by the way, that as we talk right now, 76 kids that were separated during ‘zero tolerance’ still remain separated,” he continued. “That does not include hundreds of children that the Texas Civil Rights Project says have been separated subsequently after, and the Office of the Inspector General at Health and Human Services say thousands might have been separated before ‘zero tolerance’ ever went into place.”
“So all of this is going on, there’s still huge questions about where are these kids, who are these kids, and why don’t we know about it at this point,” he said.
