Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that illegal immigrants and human traffickers are ‘using children’ to manipulate America’s immigration system and make it easier for adults to enter the U.S. without papers and remain there.
In between meetings with world leaders at an annual NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium, the president also took time to blast congressional Democrats for their unwillingness to embrace a less flexible approach to immigration law.
‘Democrats in Congress must no longer Obstruct – vote to fix our terrible Immigration Laws now,’ Trump tweeted. ‘I am watching what is going on from Europe – it would be soooo simple to fix.’
‘Judges run the system and illegals and traffickers know how it works,’ he claimed. ‘They are just using children!’
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that illegal immigrants and human traffickers are taking advantage of weaknesses in U.S. immigration law, ‘using children’ to gain access
The president’s shocking tweet comes as his administration is flouting a court-ordered deadline to reunite young children with their border-jumping parents
The Department of Homeland Security says there have been ‘many instances where human traffickers have used children to cross the border to gain illegal entry to our country’
The president’s accusation comes as his administration is struggling to meet court-ordered deadlines for reuniting thousands of minors with the grown-ups – often, but not always their parents – who jumped the U.S.-Mexico border with them.
As a caravan of asylum seekers made its way from Central America to the U.S. in April, the Department of Homeland Security expressed skepticism that all the children traveling with it were related to the adults.
‘Unfortunately, we have seen many instances where human traffickers have used children to cross the border to gain illegal entry to our country, as they know they are unlikely to be detained,’ DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton said then.
‘This is one of the very loopholes we would like to see Congress end in order to gain operational control of our border.’
Walter Armando Jimenez Melendez, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, arrived Tuesday with his four year-old son Jeremy at a shelter after being reunited after 3 months apart
Ever Reyes Mejia got his 3-year-old son back on Tuesday at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office building in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Dozens of children under 5 years of age left shelters on Tuesday as the Trump administration reunited them with their parents under a court-ordered deadline that the government didn’t entirely meet.
Government attorneys told a federal judge on Tuesday that the administration couldn’t reunite 20 children under 5 with their parents because it needed more time to track some of them down.
Some had already been deported or released into the interior of the U.S.
Judge Dana Sabraw showed no patience, saying federal agencies would have to provide good reasons for each case, or risk legal sanctions.
‘These are firm deadlines. They’re not aspirational goals,’ Sabraw said.