Trump heads to Congress, defiant on family separations

WASHINGTON: An intensifying battle over the splitting of immigrant families shifted Tuesday to Congress, where a defiant President Donald Trump will face Republican lawmakers deeply uncomfortable with the mushrooming crisis on America’s southern border.

While top administration officials have stood by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, insisting children are being held in humane conditions, criticism has swelled from international rights groups, Christian evangelicals, former US first ladies and the president’s own party.

Lawmakers who visited minors in detention in Texas and California have described crying children held in cage-like conditions behind chain link fencing, with no idea when they will see their parents again.

A chorus of critics, including a group of 75 former US attorneys who served under Democratic and Republican presidents, are demanding an immediate end to the separations, occurring as a result of an administration policy to prosecute anyone who crosses the border illegally.

But a defiant Trump has vowed America would not become a “migrant camp,” while simultaneously accusing Democrats of provoking the current crisis by blocking legislation to combat illegal immigration.

“Democrats are the problem,” he tweeted ahead of his afternoon huddle with House Republicans, charging that his opponents “don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country.”

US authorities, he tweeted, should “always arrest people” who cross the border illegally. “If you don’t have Borders, you don’t have a Country!”“#CHANGETHELAWS Now is the best opportunity ever for Congress to change the ridiculous and obsolete laws on immigration.”

With influential Republicans including senators John McCain and John Cornyn demanding an end to the separations, the House is expected to consider two immigration bills.One is a hardline measure favored by conservatives, and the other a compromise bill — which the White House has signalled has Trump’s support — that would end family separations, protect so-called Dreamer immigrants brought to the country as children, pay for boosted border security, and curtail legal immigration.

The United Nations has slammed the separation practice as unconscionable, while Amnesty International blasted it as “nothing short of torture” and Mexico’s foreign minister condemned it Tuesday as “cruel and inhuman.”Tuesday’s Republican huddle will be closely watched, in part to see whether any lawmakers directly confront the president.