Stephen Colbert slammed Trump’s controversial zero tolerance immigration crackdown on Monday night with a gutting segment where he took aim at the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and her recent attempts to defend separating migrant children from their parents at the border.
Nielsen was trotted out to answer questions on the subject on Monday as criticism of the policy grew and heartbreaking images of toddlers weeping as they were confronted by border agents began to spread online.
Under the ‘zero tolerance policy’, children are taken from the adults they are found with when trying to enter the country and are placed in shelters until they can be given different homes with relatives in their native country while the adults are put in US detention centers to face prosecution or deportation.
One of the many reasons Nielsen gave to justify the practice was that some of the people presenting themselves as families on the border were not in fact related.
Others have since suggested that the adults carrying the kids may be gang members or criminals posing as parents to improve their chances of entry.
On Monday night, Stephen Colbert ripped the Trump administration and its defense of the controversial ‘zero tolerance’ policy on immigration which is seeing migrant toddlers being separated from their parents at the border
This June 12 image shows a toddler weeping as her Honduran mother is questioned by border patrol agents at the Texan border. Not long afterwards, they would have been separated as her mother was put in custody and she was taken to a detention center. The Trump administration has claimed that there is an increase in the number of people posing as families to gain entry to the US. Since the start of the 2018 fiscal year, there have been 191 cases of this compared to 46 in the entire fiscal year of 2017
‘We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are in fact a family,’ she said.
In 2017, 46 cases of it occurred. There have been 191 cases in the first five months of this fiscal year, the Department of Homeland Security said afterwards.
Colbert tore through Nielsen’s claim, sarcastically suggesting that the children may not even be children but ‘adults with shoes on their knees’.
He made consistent reference to them being held in ‘child prisons’ and accused him of orchestrating an ‘all baby reboot of The Shawshank Redemption’.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was put in front of the media on Monday to answer questions about the policy. She said she and others were just ‘doing their job’
‘Yes who can tell if these weeping toddlers are even part of a family? They might not even be toddlers! They might be adults with shoes on their knees!’ Colbert fumed.
He also accused her of hypocritically turning immigrants away from the US when she was likely the daughter of migrants herself, basing his argument on her European name.
‘Some say the policy doesn’t even exist like Secretary of Homeland Security, and definitely not the descendant of immigrants, Kirstjen Nielsen, who tweeted yesterday: “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”
‘Then why are you locking up kids in an abandoned Walmart?!’ he asked.
Colbert also took aim at White House Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller who he called an ‘impotent tool’ and later parodied the president as the devil.
‘Trump’s defenders are wrong and they are bad. But it’s important to give the devil his due. He’s the sponsor,’ he said.
Nielsen was somewhat of an unknown figure in the administration until she appeared on Monday to answer reporters’ questions on the subject.
Colbert was furious with Nielsen’s attempts to justify the policy and jokingly cheered, like a cheerleader: ‘2, 4, 6, 8, who do we incarcerate? Kids! Goooooooo…. to the cages!’
At the end of his monologue, the comedian deemed all of Trump’s disciples on the subject ‘bad and wrong’
Her response that the administration was merely ‘doing its job’ has been met with ire and fury across the aisle with many accusing her of giving an unemotional answer to a deeply emotional issue.
Conservatives, however, are standing by the policy and say the media is exaggerating the conditions at the detention centers where the people found at the border are being held.
Fox’s Laura Ingraham sparked controversy on Monday by claiming the children’s centers were more like ‘summer camps’ than prisons while Conservative pundit Ann Coulter argued that the children being pictured weeping are ‘child actors’.
President Trump has blamed the saga on the Democrats and says it is their ‘cruel’ legislation which forces agents to separate families.
The top United Nations Human Rights official has slammed it as ‘unconscionable’ and even First Lady Melania Trump has spoken out to condemn the practice.
The camps are in Texas where, as of Tuesday morning, more than 1,100 people were being held.
The inside of a dormitory at the Tornillo facility, a shelter for children of detained migrants, is seen in this photo provided by the US Department of Health and Human Services, in Tornillo, Texas
A detention center where children are being held behind cages walls and where they are sleeping on thin bed mats with foil blankets
The adult centers feature the same cages which many are deeming ‘inhumane’