President Donald Trump’s campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh claims that some of the kids who have been separated from their parents at the U.S. border haven’t been reunited with their families because the parents don’t want their children back.
During a Friday appearance on CNN’s “New Day,” Murtaugh said the reunification process is more complicated than it has been publicly portrayed.
“The fact is it's not as simple as you make it sound or Joe Biden made it sound on the stage last night to locate the parents who are in other countries,” Murtaugh said. “And when they do locate them, it has been DHS’ experience that in many cases the parents do not want the children returned.”
In 2018, the Trump administration instituted a ''zero tolerance'' policy that separated migrant children and parents at the southern U.S. border. Murtaugh called it a "regrettable situation."
He told host John Berman that when the parents are located in other countries, in “many cases” the “parents do not want the children sent back to them in their home countries.”
This week, several media outlets have reported that the federal government has been unable to find the parents of more than 500 children who were separated from their families after crossing the U.S. border.
Murtaugh did not provide any proof that parents are rejecting the return of their children.
The topic of immigration and separating families came up during the final presidential debate on Thursday night.
Biden called it “criminal” to keep these children away from their parents, Politico reports.
“Parents were ripped — their kids were ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 of sets of those parents and those kids are alone,” Biden said. “[With] nowhere to go. Nowhere to go.”
Trump responded by slamming the immigration policy of President Barack Obama's administration and touting his own administration's treatment of child migrants.
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