DHS Chief Chad Wolf Defends Separating Migrant Children From Parents Before Deportation

Acting Homeland Security Chief Chad Wolf defended ICE’s practice of separating migrant children from their parents and holding them in hotels prior to deportation, claiming that this is something that the agency has done “for decades.” Regardless of the fact that ICE hasn’t been around “for decades,” the practice is cruel, inhumane, and completely unnecessary. But with this administration, the cruelty is the point. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Last week, uh, acting chief of department of Homeland security, Chad Wolf, uh, during a questioning session by the United States Senate defended this administration's practice of not only separating migrant children from their parents, but of separating the migrants and then sticking those children into hotels rather than the approved and government paid for facilities. For housing migrants, they were sticking them in hotels. They were sticking them in hotels, in Arizona, hotels in Texas, some of them children who had been separated by their parents as young as one year old, there was apparently one group that was several five year olds who had been separated from their parents and put together in a hotel for two weeks. But Chad Wolf, right? The manliest of names

Tells Democratic Senator Kristen Sinema. There's no problem with this.

This is just

How this has always been done. He said, it's been done for decades. We just take them. We separate them and we just stick them in hotels. And then they get deported the next day. He said, they get deported the next day. Now the reason he had to say they get deported the next day is cause if he had said, Oh, sometimes they sit there for two weeks. Sometimes they sit there for a month, which is actually the truth. But if he had said it out loud, that would be an admission that he, the department of Homeland security and this entire administration were in fact violating the Flores settlement. So we had to say that, yeah, I mean, we separate them sometimes a one year old new, we put them in a room and hope for the best, but then they get deported the next day.

That's not true. The one year old that I mentioned earlier was there for almost a week. The group of five-year-olds was there for two weeks. Most people are there for several days, which is a direct violation of the Flores settlement, which is why there's more and more lawsuits challenging what Chad Wolf and the department of Homeland security are doing. Here's the thing though. Folks, his justification for this was that just how it's always been done. It's been done for decades, even though ice hasn't existed for decades. Ice has existed for roughly 16 and a half years, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if ice had existed for 2000 years. It doesn't matter if this had always been the practice throughout all of human history, uh, that doesn't make it okay. You know, there was a time in existence in human existence where it was totally cool and acceptable to sacrifice human beings, to sacrifice children, to go, you know, uh, bring them up onto the altar and just cut them open and let the animals come and devour them.

That was a sacrifice. And that was totally accepted. Everybody was like, yeah. Okay. That's what we do. We look on that now, as, as barbaric, you know, there's lots of practices throughout history that up to that point were how things were always done. But we look on it now and we say, my God, how can you do this? Why would you let this happen? This is awful. I hope that is how we look back on this administration. It's how we look back on the Obama administration. I'll tell you that much.