President Donald Trump, after weeks of saying only Democrats can fix the migrant-child crisis, did an about-face on Wednesday, signing an executive order reversing his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents when they illegally cross at the border.
“We are keeping families together,” Trump said in the Oval Office, where he was joined by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Vice President Mike Pence.
“This will solve that problem. At the same time, we are keeping a very powerful border and it continues to be a zero tolerance. We have zero tolerance for people who enter our country illegally,” he said.
As CNN pointed out, in signing the order, Trump “officially reversed his debunked argument that he had no authority to stop separations of undocumented immigrant families at the border.”
JUST IN: President Trump signs executive order stopping family separations at the border pic.twitter.com/K7zdDfLxvm
— Meg Wagner (@megwagner) 20 June 2018
Trump announced his decision to sign the executive order earlier on Wednesday.
“We’re going to be signing an executive order in a little while,” Trump said at the top of a Cabinet Room meeting with Republican lawmakers assembled to resolve, at last, the humanitarian and PR crisis spawned by heartbreaking images of children being detained in converted old Wal-Marts and tent cities near the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We’re going to keep families together. But 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, that we don’t want,” Trump said.