RENO, Nev. (AP) - Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said Friday the Trump administration’s executive order intended to address the separation of children from their families at the U.S. border is no better than the existing policy.
“The executive order that this administration signed still wants to put children and their families behind bars and treat them like criminals. This is outrageous,” said the Nevada Democrat who became the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.
“That is the zero-tolerance policy that this administration under (Attorney General) Jeff Sessions implemented and they have not changed that policy,” she said.
Cortez Masto spoke at a news conference at the Reno headquarters of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, along with some of the leaders of a coalition of 17 progressive groups that tried unsuccessfully to persuade a national school law enforcement group to withdraw its invitation to Sessions to speak at a school safety conference in Reno on Monday.
Officials for the National Association of School Resource Officers said Friday the group was going through with its original plans and the Justice Department indicated Sessions would still make the appearance despite the critics’ pledge to disrupt the conference with a protest outside the hotel-casino where the event is happening.
Leaders of more than a dozen labor unions, religious and minority groups in northern Nevada sent a letter Thursday asking the association to rescind its invitation to Sessions.
“Rolling out the welcome mat to Sessions as your keynote speaker at this moment would demonstrate your complicity” with his support for the policy of separating migrant parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, they said.
“Absent a formal condemnation of Sessions and his policy, it makes NASRO an accomplice in the internment of children at the border,” the coalition said.
Groups signing the letter included the state teacher’s union, Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada Action Fund, Ahora Latino Journal, Asian Community Development Council, NARAL Pro-Choice Nevada, Service Employees International Union Local 1107 and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northern Nevada.
Cortez Masto, whose grandfather is an immigrant, said “holding thousands of children behind bars is inhumane and it is not who we are as Americans.”
“When Donald Trump attacks immigrants, he attacks Nevadans,” she said, noting that one in five Nevadans is an immigrant.
Mo Canady, executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers, said in a statement emailed to The Associated Press on Friday that Sessions has important information to share with school resource officers as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. He said Sessions’ message is especially important “in the wake of recent, tragic shootings at several of the nation’s schools.”
The Justice Department added in a separate email to AP on Friday, “We look forward to continuing our strong working relationship with NASRO and improving school safety.”
The new executive order halts the practice that has resulted in the separation of more than 2,300 immigrant children from their families. Homeland Security officials will now detain families together, but it’s not clear what will happen with the children who are already separated.
Justice Department lawyers filed a memorandum on Thursday to a class-action settlement that governs how children are handled when they are caught crossing the U.S. border illegally. The settlement states that families cannot be detained longer than 20 days.
The department said in the email to AP that the department has “moved promptly to modify a decades’ old consent decree in order to end family separation.”
It called on Congress “to finally act to keep families together, end catch and release, and create the foundation for an immigration system that serves the national interest,” and said the administration will continue to enforce the law and protect the border.
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Eds: This story corrects an earlier version that attributed a statement from the National Association of School Resource Officers to a group spokesman. The statement was from the group’s executive director Mo Canady.
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