Revealed: Rod Rosenstein advised there was no age limits on child separations
Source: The Guardian
Revealed: Rod Rosenstein advised there was no age limits on child separations
Former deputy attorney general’s 2018 conference call with US prosecutors in border states shocked some participants, Guardian learns
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington
@skirchy
Thu 23 Jul 2020 11.00 BST
Last modified on Thu 23 Jul 2020 13.35 BST
Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, advised US attorneys implementing the 2018 zero tolerance policy that there could be no blanket ban on prosecuting migrant parents who had children under the age of five, the Guardian has learned.
The comments on a conference call in May 2018 privately shocked some border state prosecutors because, in effect, it meant that no child was too young to be separated from its parents under the policy, which called for all migrants entering the US illegally to be criminally prosecuted.
The family separations that followed are seen today by experts as one of the gravest domestic human rights violations to have occurred under the Trump administration.
The policy was in place for six weeks and resulted in the separation of 2,814 children from their parents and guardians, about 105 of whom were under the age of five and 1,033 under the age of 10.
Rosenstein issued his guidance to US attorneys from border states about two weeks after the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued an order that there would be an “escalated effort” to prosecute all illegal entries into the US along the southern border, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/23/child-separation-migrants-prosecutors-rod-rosenstein
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