NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Tennessee’s leading U.S. Senate candidates on Tuesday decried the separation of immigrant families at the border, with Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn laying the blame for that on liberals.
Blackburn said that as a mother, her “heart breaks for the families,” but she contended that liberals wouldn’t pay to enforce immigration laws or build suitable facilities for asylum seekers. The lawmaker who has aligned herself closely with President Donald Trump said rulings by liberal judges mean children can’t be kept with their families when it comes to border security enforcement.
Blackburn’s claims come as Tennessee’s Republican senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, say the separation of families is a new policy by the Trump administration, and one that it should end itself immediately while the Republican-led Congress negotiates a larger immigration solution. Trump, meanwhile, has also blamed Democrats, referencing a Democratic law that does not exist.
Court rulings establish the right of migrant children, not parents, to be released from custody. But they don’t require the detention of parents, either.
“That lapse in judgment put us in the difficult position of choosing between enforcing our laws or keeping families together,” Blackburn said in a statement. “We don’t have to choose if we fix this problem, secure our borders, and keep people from coming across our border illegally and choosing to put their families in danger.”
As an example of efforts to increase border enforcement and add facilities for asylum seekers, the campaign lamented that in 2014, the then-Democratic-controlled Senate wouldn’t consider a $694 million border supplemental funding bill that passed the GOP-led House largely on party lines. The bill included $197 million for temporary housing and humanitarian assistance for unaccompanied migrant children, short of the $1.8 billion that then-President Barack Obama requested for that work under the Department of Health and Human Services. The bill also would have added money for border agencies, immigration judges and detention spaces.
The bill also would have permitted tens of thousands of Central American youths who came to the U.S. unaccompanied to be sent back home without deportation hearings.
Democratic ex-Gov. Phil Bredesen, Blackburn’s likely foe in November, said that “any normal American is horrified” by the separation of families, and he called for an immediate fix on an issue that he said transcends President Donald Trump’s administration.
“We have placed ourselves on a morally bankrupt path,” Bredesen said in a statement. “Today, the real test of our strength as a nation is not whether we’ve made a mistake, it’s whether we recognize where we’ve failed and fix it. Now.”
In Washington on Tuesday, House Republican leaders in Congress shifted focus to a new plan to keep children in detention longer than now permitted, but with their parents. Lawmakers are looking to quell public outrage over the images and sounds of children held in facilities under the Trump administration’s policy of separating families after illegal border crossings. Under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, more than 2,300 minors were separated from their children at the border from May 5 through June 9, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The seat that Blackburn and Bredesen are seeking is held by Corker, the retiring senator who has spoken out on multiple occasions against Trump and his policies.
“While the issues surrounding our immigration system are complex, we can all agree that innocent children should be protected and not used for deterrence,” Corker said in a statement.
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