Trump promises order to end family separations

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is preparing to sign an executive order to halt the separation of migrant children from their parents on the US border, as global criticism of the practice mounted.

The announcement came after his administration was besieged from all sides over the policy, launched in early May, to arrest anyone crossing the border illegally.

That crackdown sent the adults for prosecution as criminals -- and removed their children from their care, sending them to tent camps and other facilities where they were unable to contact their loved ones.

As images and accounts of sobbing children wrested from their parents circulated, Trump´s own Republican Party began to rebel, prompting him to do an about-face after days of saying it was up to Congress to act, and pledge executive action.

"We want security for the country," Trump said at a meeting with Republican lawmakers at the White House. "And we will have that at the same time we have compassion, we want to keep families together."

"We are signing an executive order in a little while" to end the practice, Trump said.

The president however made clear he was not easing up on his determination to shut down the border to illegal immigration, calling it a source of rampant crime and drugs.

"We still have to maintain toughness, or our country will be overrun by people, by crime, by all of the things that we don´t stand for and we don´t want," he said.

As countries marked World Refugee Day Wednesday, British Prime Minister Theresa May, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Council of Europe and Pope Francis all took issue with Trump´s "zero tolerance" policy.

May said images of migrant children kept in cage-like units were "deeply disturbing," and the Council of Europe, a global human rights watchdog, said Trump had abdicated any claim to moral leadership in the world.

"A person´s dignity does not depend on them being a citizen, a migrant, or a refugee. Saving the life of someone fleeing war and poverty is an act of humanity," the pope said on Twitter.

Trump continued to blame opposition Democrats and the media for the crisis on the southern US border.

After a downturn last year, since October, the number of migrants seeking to cross the southwest US border from impoverished Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, as well as from Mexico, has surged.

From March to May this year, more than 50,000 people a month were apprehended for illegally crossing the border from Mexico. About 15 percent of those are arriving as families, and eight percent as unaccompanied children.