U.S. President Donald Trump Finally Signs Executive Order to Stop Family Separations

The United States President signed an executive order on Wednesday, June 20 ending the process of separating children from families after they are detained crossing the U.S. border illegally. While signing the order he said, ‘we’re going to keep families together’. The executive order came after the Trump Administration faced a huge backlash, domestically and abroad for his ‘zero tolerance’ stance that categorised those crossing into the U.S. illegally to seek asylum as criminal aliens which mandated separating families.

“I consider it to be a very important executive order,” Donald Trump said during the signing ceremony in the Oval Office, flanked by Vice-President Mike Pence and the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen. “It’s about keeping families together while at the same time being sure that we have a very powerful, very strong border, and border security will be equal if not greater than previously.

“We’re going to have strong, very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the families together. I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he added.

Trump’s order however suggests the government intends to hold the families indefinitely by challenging an existing statute, the 1997 Flores Settlement, that places a 20-day limit on how long children, along or with their parents, can be detained. That move could lead to new legal battles for the administration.

Trump had for weeks stuck to his stand of a “zero tolerance” enforcement policy, which has led to the separation of more than 2,300 children from their parents at the border between the months of April and June and an additional 700 between the months of October 2017 to April this year. The president had been arguing until just yesterday that the alternative would be an “open border”.

The ‘zero tolerance’ policy came after Trump Administration’s top officials, including the attorney general Jeff Sessions, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, said this policy was necessary to deter migrants from attempting to illegally enter the United States.

“The dilemma is that if you’re weak, as some people would like you to be, if you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country’s going to be overrun with millions of people,” Trump said. “And if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart. That’s a tough dilemma. Perhaps I’d rather be strong but that’s a tough dilemma.”

However, the U.S. President’s stand and his government’s actions have been condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Council calling the policy of deterrence using children, “unconscionable”. Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May, an ally of President Trump said in the House of Commons that the Trump Administration’s actions were a cause of concern.

But the turn around seems to have come after a tsunami of outrage grew across the U.S. including from First Lady Melania Trump who said children should not be separated from their parents, former first lady Barbara Bush who wrote an oped in a newspaper condemning the policy and Trump’s Republic Party lawmakers who conveyed to the president that his policy had very little support amongst American voters.

Full details of the executive order have not yet been made available by the Trump Administration. (With Agency inputs)

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 21, 2018 02:28 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).