Stephen Miller, the key architect of many of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, has slammed President Joe Biden for suggesting that Trump let migrant children ‘starve to death’ at the border.
At his press conference on Thursday, Biden had said: ‘The idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let them starve to death and stay on the other side, no previous administrations did either, except Trump.’
Biden was responding to questions about the massive surge of unaccompanied minors crossing into the U.S. illegally, with such crossing nearly doubling from last year and nearly 15,000 minors currently in federal custody.
‘What Joe Biden said at that press conference is a detestable lie,’ Miller told Fox News. ‘It’s not just a smear against President Trump. It’s a smear against the patriotic border agents who saved the lives, who rescued unaccompanied minors and got them safely back home.’
‘What Joe Biden said at that press conference is a detestable lie,’ Stephen Miller said. ‘It’s not just a smear against President Trump. It’s a smear against the patriotic border agents
President Joe Biden suggested that Trump let migrant children ‘starve to death’ at the border
Miller defended the Trump administration’s policy of returning unaccompanied minors to their country of origin, accusing Biden’s administration of truly ‘separating families.’
‘If you came here as a 15-year-old from Honduras and Border Patrol apprehended you, they would then process you, put you on a chartered flight paid for by the U.S. Government, send you back to your home country, meet up with social services in Honduras, work with our State Department to get you back with your own family,’ Miller said of Trump policies.
‘Joe Biden is separating these families, stranding them in the United States, and sending the message not just to Central America, but to the whole world that if you split off your family, if you send someone here 17 or younger alone, they will stay here for life,’ he added.
‘His [Biden’s] administration, in writing, terminated the reunification policy we had in place to send unaccompanied minors back to their home countries wherever they may come from,’ Miller continued.
‘He [Biden] terminated that policy in writing, that’s not in dispute. I guess he doesn’t know, or his staff is lying to him so that he then can mislead the country,’ said Miller.
Migrants lie on mattresses inside a temporary processing facility for migrants, including unaccompanied minors, in Donna, Texas in a Biden administration handout photo
‘We didn’t need surge facilities to hold tens, hundreds of thousands of people the way that we are going, because we had a process for returning them — be it to Mexico, Central America, or elsewhere. He [Biden] dismantled that process, invited the surge, and now he has nowhere to put them,’ Miller said.
Miller is viewed as the mastermind of the ‘zero tolerance’ policy during the Trump administration that saw all illegal border crossers arrested, resulting in parents being separated from children. The policy was rescinded after fierce backlash.
Biden said on Thursday he would not apologize for rolling back immigration policies of his Republican predecessor that undermined “human dignity” and brushed off criticism that migrants were making the journey to the southern border because they perceived him to be a “nice guy.”
While he mostly struck an empathetic tone, he said the United States was expelling the vast majority of migrants, including families, under a COVID-19 public health order.
The Trump-era order allows border agents to rapidly expel migrants without giving them a chance to claim asylum, but it has angered civil rights groups, who say it is illegal.
The number of migrants caught at the border has climbed sharply in recent weeks, thrusting Biden into an emerging humanitarian and political crisis a little more than two months after he took office.
Asylum seeking migrant families and unaccompanied minors from Central America take refuge in a makeshift U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing center in Texas
The migrants include a rising number of unaccompanied minors, who have not been subject to the pandemic-related expulsion policy.
As of Tuesday, nearly 5,000 children were backed up in crowded border stations awaiting transfers to overwhelmed federal shelters.
Biden said he would not leave children stranded at the border.
“I make no apologies for ending programs that did not exist before Trump became president that have an incredibly negative impact on the law, international law, as well as on human dignity,” he said.
U.S. Border Patrol caught roughly 100,000 migrants at the border in February, the highest monthly level since a spike in mid-2019.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week that illegal border crossings are on pace for the highest level in 20 years.
