Stephen and I talked about the Trump administration's family separation policy last month. Here's the first part of our conversation.
Here's part two.
Stephen has been trying to get people to pay attention to family separations for years. Here's his monologue from the height of the policy, the night after we were let into Casa Padre to see the conditions kids were being held in.
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I was one of the reporters Trump said he "brought" to see family separations. He, and he alone, systematically separated thousands of children -- "torture" per @P4HR and "government sanctioned child abuse" per @AmerAcadPeds after they were warned it would damage kids for life.
Read more about the 545 parents the Trump administration separated which *as of this week* it still cannot find, years later.nbcnews.com/politics/immig…
Trump never answered @kwelkernbc's question about how he'll reunite them because he doesn't have a plan. Worse, right now they couldn't if they wanted to. They cannot be reached, because their record keeping was so shoddy.
Wrong, Chase. I literally talked to one of those families on Monday — 8 year old in CA (taken from his dad when he was 6) and father in Honduras trying to reunite — and will have audio of that interview on @NicolleDWallace’s show momentarily.
It cannot be possible @SpoxDHS is unaware there’s a status hearing tomorrow in the family separation case and the Trump admin and the ACLU are planning on discussing reunifications of still-separated families, can it? Who wrote this statement?
"People ask when we will find all of these families and, sadly, I can’t give an answer... will not stop looking until we have found every one... tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, who remain here,” said @leegelernt.
Most of these parents, if ever found, will face insurmountable hurdles to reunification with their children in the United States.
NEW: President Trump has failed to deport “millions,” as promised. Local cops have all but made that impossible by refusing to cooperate with him. Instead he’s resorted to show-of-force ICE raids immigration activists say are tactics used to terrorize.
An ICE spokesman told me Trump's inability to deport more people than Obama is due in part to local law enforcement refusing to work with ICE, like here in L.A.
"The majority of [deportations] come from cooperation with state and local law enforcement partners," he said.
This is the place inside L.A. County Jail where ICE used to take into custody inmates who had finished serving their time -- including those whose charges were dismissed or committed minor offenses. @LACoSheriff kicked them out.
Why aren't we talking more about violence over Trump's border wall construction between the Border Patrol, U.S. Park Police and Indigenous protestors? Because too few are willing to do what @AliVelshi did today: go see what's happening with your own eyes. #Velshi@VelshiMSNBC
Here’s our complete report — which I’m grateful @AliVelshi played some of — on border wall construction and the profound impact it is having.