Media

Former ICE Director Stands Firm On Immigration Policy After Listening To Audio Of Children Crying

MSNBC 7/30/2018

Mike Brest Reporter
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A reporter played an audio recording of children crying after being separated from their parents at the border to former ICE Director Thomas Homan during a PBS interview, which was teased during MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.

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“I’m a parent. It is sad,” Homan responded when asked if he condemned the separation. “But when a government chooses to enforce the law and they separate the parents being prosecuted, just like [when] every U.S. citizen — person — in this country is separated when he gets arrested, people want a different set of rules for an illegal alien.”

“It was abundantly clear after talking to him that he sees this as a simple case of there’s a law about how you legally enter the country and he’s going to enforce it. And the president has accepted that kind of approach to this,” PBS correspondent Martin Smith said of Homan during his appearance on “Morning Joe.”

Smith played the tape for Homan even after Homan said it wasn’t necessary.

Smith continued, “If you want to have a humane process of deciding who can come and who deserves to come, who is fleeing violence and needs asylum, you have to have judges.”

The PBS Frontline episode “Separated: Children at the Border,” which includes the Homan interview, will be released on Tuesday.