“The Trump administration implemented this policy by choice and could end it by choice.”

The Washington Post: The facts about Trump’s policy of separating families at the border.

“The doublespeak coming from Trump and top administration officials on this issue is breathtaking, not only because of the sheer audacity of these claims but also because they keep being repeated without evidence. Immigrant families are being separated at the border not because of Democrats and not because some law forces this result, as Trump insists. They’re being separated because the Trump administration, under its zero-tolerance policy, is choosing to prosecute border-crossing adults for any offenses.

This includes illegal-entry misdemeanors, which are being prosecuted at a rate not seen in previous administrations. Because the act of crossing itself is now being treated as an offense worthy of prosecution, any family that enters the United States illegally is likely to end up separated. Nielsen may choose not to call this a “family separation policy,“ but that’s precisely the effect it has.

Sessions, who otherwise owns up to what’s happening, has suggested that the Flores settlement and a court ruling are forcing his hand. They’re not. At heart, this is an issue of prosecutorial discretion: his discretion.”

NYmag Daily Intelligencer: Trump Ends Family Separations by Ordering Family Detentions.

“In effect, Trump has switched from holding children hostage to congressional action to holding entire families hostage instead.

So in the very narrowest sense Trump is complying with demands that he end family separations at the border, but only by way of creating the equally large problem of large-scale family detentions at the border, and ignoring the more obvious option of abandoning the whole “zero tolerance“ posture until such time as the system can be overhauled. The president’s allies will try to sell us on his compassion for kids and his extreme flexibility in modifying his administration’s procedures without, of course, giving up its devotion to The Law. The real question is whether the sights and sounds from the border that turned the cruel Trump-Sessions policy into a political disaster will get that much better now that children are no longer suffering on their own.”

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