Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former White House senior adviser, said Sunday a wall at the southern border would solve the problem of separating children from parents who illegally enter the United States.
“Give me a border wall and we won’t have this problem,” Mr. Bannon told ABC’s “This Week.”
The former Breitbart News executive chairman said the president is simply enforcing the law in response to critics who say it is immoral to separate families.
“The morality is the law. They are criminals when they came across and that’s why they are getting separated,” Mr. Bannon said. “Children cannot stay with parents who are getting charged with a crime.”
But Democrats in Congress say the policy is tearing apart families.
“Trump is using the grief, tears, and pain of these kids as mortar to build his wall,” tweeted California Rep. Adam Schiff, top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
According to NBC News, 1,995 children have been separated from their parents during a roughly six-week period under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, where children are removed from their parents’ custody when the Department of Homeland Security prosecutes them for entering the country illegally.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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