WASHINGTON – President Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert called last week’s immigration mess that included images of children being held in wire cages “terrible optics” for the administration – suggesting the missteps were avoidable.
“This week has been just gripping imagery and terrible optics for the administration,” Bossert said to ABC’s ”This Week” host George Stephanopoulos.
Bossert explained that while former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly – now White House chief of staff – had talked about separating children from parents at the border as a “sole deterrent,” the administration decided not to do that.
“That’s part of the confusion and messaging this week and a real failure not to go out and clarify that,” Bossert said.
Instead, the family separations happened because of the Justice Department’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone who crossed the border illegally.
“Although it’s an understandable and righteous decision to take to prosecute any illegal entrant into the country, almost from the outset we didn’t have the capacity to detain these parents and children, together or separately,” Bossert said.
The president tried to fix the problem his administration instigated by signing an executive order that would allow families to be detained together.
But Bossert believed that the order would likely be struck down by a federal judge who ruled against detaining children in 2015.
“She called President Obama’s policy of detaining children and parents together inhumane,” she said. “There is no way this executive order survives first contact because her view of President Trump will be harsher.”
As far as a legislative fix, Bossert said the president feels it’s unlikely that a comprehensive immigration bill will get through because “his view, at this point, is that each of these negotiations have so many poison pills.”
“They’re up there fighting over e-verify and fighting over how many agricultural workers we need to allow in,” Bossert said. “Look, the big picture here is very few politicians on both sides of the aisle have ever been willing to answer the hard questions of the quality, quantity and type of person that we’re willing to allow into this country … no one wants to answer that hard question.”
One conservative immigration bill in the House of Representatives didn’t have the votes to pass and a House vote on a “compromise” piece of legislation was delayed.
“I wish the attorney general hadn’t invoked the Bible,” Bossert also said.
In a speech to law enforcement officials, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had invoked Romans 13 – “to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” as Sessions put it – to defend his department’s policy of prosecuting everyone who’s crossed the country’s southern border.
“I think it’s time for us to pray for all the people suffering in this situation,” Bossert suggested. “The kids, the parents, the law enforcement officials, their families.”
“And it’s time for us to put a little bit more money and a lot more time of focus for the American viewers into the second part of the president’s immigration strategy and that is to put real, sustainable, buildable money into the institutional reforms in those three northern triangle countries –
Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras – that they need to prevent this plague from coming to America,” Bossert said.
Bossert left the White House in April, as incoming national security adviser John Bolton wished to bring in his own people.
