The full House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Trump Administration’s zero tolerance family separation policy today, as part of an ongoing Democratic effort to finally bring accountability to the practice that has separated thousands of migrant families.
As our own DHS Watch this morning noted, today’s hearing was notable partly because it featured former refugee director Scott Lloyd, who has been resisting testifying for months. Meanwhile, earlier this month, during the Energy & Commerce hearing on family separation, U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps Commander Jonathan White testified that he told higher-ups — including Lloyd — of how harmful separating families would be. Apparently, Lloyd never passed these concerns along.
Additional highlights from the hearing today included questioning from Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), who each asked part of the panel whether they had recognized that family separation was wrong, and had spoken out against it. Except for Commander White, the answer was basically no.
Meanwhile, Carla Provost, Chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, admitted that it’s not just parents with “serious criminal convictions” that are separated from their families — those who had previously entered the U.S. and been caught were punished by zero tolerance as well.
Whoa @RepEscobar gets Chief Carla Provost to admit that someone previously convicted of non-violent felony illegal entry will be separated from their child. Provost said earlier that only parents with “serious criminal convictions” would be separated.
View the full live-tweeting below, courtesy of the Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick and ACLU’s Madhuri Singh Grewal:
