6/19/18
More than 75 former U.S. attorneys are calling on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to stop family separations, saying the decision to implement a policy that has led to more than 2,000 children taken from their parents "falls squarely on your shoulders."
In a letter to Sessions, the bipartisan group says that under previous administrations prosecutors used their discretion to decide if people who crossed the border illegally should be charged or go through a civil process to determine if they qualify for asylum, which would allow the family unit to stay together. Under the Trump administration's policy, they say, prosecutors are told to prosecute everyone who crosses the border illegally for "illegal entry," which they say forces them into a criminal process that requires children be separated, even though the crime is only a misdemeanor. The former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Ken Magidson, who signed the letter, wrote in an editorial Tuesday that the administration's policy is legal, but not moral, and called on Sessions to give prosecutors discretion that would allow families to stay together. "Splitting up parents and children is too harsh a penalty for what is commonly a misdemeanor offense," Magidson wrote in an editorial in the Houston Chronicle.
"As former United States Attorneys, we also emphasize that the Zero Tolerance policy is a radical departure from previous Justice Department policy, and that it is dangerous, expensive, and inconsistent with the values of the institution in which we served," they wrote in the letter posted online Tuesday. The attorneys say the law does not require the systemic separation of families and that the administration's policy has caused a "traumatic and unsustainable" situation that does not account for each family's specific circumstances. "Under your policy, families and children are greeted with unexpected cruelty at the doorstep of the United States, instead of with relief or asylum in the greatest country in the world," the attorneys wrote in the letter, signed first by former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara.
