There really is nothing they won't lie about. It is the instinctive response to seemingly any political obstacle. It comes from the top, of course: Donald Trump, American president, does not merely lie—a feature of all politicians. He attempts to reshape reality to suit his own wants and needs. The truth is whatever enough people will believe.

That impulse has trickled down in a big way. The press secretaries lie. The senior staffers lie. The cabinet secretaries lie. That includes Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who had this to say when it initially emerged the Trump administration was tearing migrant children away from their parents and incarcerating them as part of a policy of "zero-tolerance" at the border:

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NIELSEN: This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border.

That wasn't the only instance where she made the claim:

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We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period. — Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen (@SecNielsen) June 17, 2018

This was always absurd. Separating families was always an explicit and inevitable product of the zero-tolerance policy. After all, if you're going to prosecute every adult who crosses the border outside of an official checkpoint, you're going to prosecute some who come with their children. If you're going to prosecute them, you have to detain them in an adult jail, away from their children. To put them in that jail, you're going to separate them from their kids. The Department of Homeland Security was well aware of this in April, before the policy was instituted, according to The Washington Post:

If approved, the zero-tolerance measure could split up thousands of families, although officials say they would not prosecute those who turn themselves in at legal ports of entry and claim asylum. More than 20,000 of the 30,000 migrants who sought asylum during the first quarter — the period from October-December — of the current fiscal year crossed the border illegally.

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In a memorandum that outlines the proposal and was obtained by The Washington Post, officials say that threatening adults with criminal charges and prison time would be the “most effective” way to reverse the steadily rising number of attempted crossings. Most parents now caught crossing the border illegally with their children are quickly released to await civil deportation hearings.

That memo was addressed to Nielsen, which would indicate she'd been made aware of the consequences of the proposed policy in advance. But the Post didn't technically have proof she'd seen it. That almost certainly arrived today, with a trove of emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and published by Open the Government, a nonpartisan transparency organization:

The biggest revelation in the documents is a memo dated April 23, in which top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials urged criminal prosecution of parents crossing the border with children—the policy that led to the crisis that continues today. The memo, first reported on by the Washington Post on April 26, but never previously published, provides evidence that Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen signed off on a policy of family separation despite her repeated claims denying that there was such a policy. The Post appears to have obtained a copy of the memo prior to its signature.

The memo states that DHS could “permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.” It outlines three options for implementing “zero tolerance,” the policy of increased prosecution of immigration violations. Of these, it recommends “Option 3,” referring for prosecution all adults crossing the border without authorization, “including those presenting with a family unit,” as the “most effective.”

The last page of the memo contains a signature approving Option 3, but the signature—almost certainly Nielsen’s, given that the memo is addressed to her—was blacked out by FOIA officers on privacy grounds. FOIA officials also appear to have redacted the date of the signature indicating approval.

Family separations weren't just part of the zero-tolerance policy, or a consequence of it. They were the policy, because Nielsen's department chose that policy.

Open the Government will appeal the redactions in the memo on the basis that the Secretary of Homeland Security is a "high-level public official," and that there are no reasonable grounds for obscuring Nielsen's role in policymaking. (Esquire has reached out to DHS for comment.) The redactions are potentially a scandal in themselves, in that they could breach transparency laws—in spirit at the very least—to protect a cabinet official's hide. But most importantly, this is stronger-than-ever proof that Nielsen knew exactly what the full ramifications of the zero-tolerance policy would be and signed off on it anyway. In fact, she chose that policy. At some point, the public insistence that it wasn't a "family-separation policy" moves from semantics to outright deception.

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(As further proof of the connection, and evidence Nielsen read the document, the language she used in the press conference above is mirrored in the memo. For one thing, both emphasized the policy sought to prevent child trafficking. Nielsen elsewhere claimed there had been a 300 percent increase in cases where smugglers posed as a family with unrelated children to get across the southern border. That turned out to be lying-by-statistics: while the number of cases did jump from 46 to 191 during equivalent five-month periods, those represented one half of one percent of the 31,000 people who crossed the border illegally in that span. In reality, a spike Nielsen described as "staggering" was statistically negligible.)

And then there's this:



The memo does not discuss any plan for reuniting separated families, or the harmful effects of separation on children, nor does it reflect any input from the government agencies who would be responsible for caring for the separated children.

That's the root of this thing. They never cared about the kids, and not just what the psychological damage might be. They never cared enough to get a viable tracking system in place to make sure the children could be reunited with parents whom, according to other documents Open the Government obtained, the Trump administration sought to deport as fast as possible. That's why, as of September 20, at least 182 children remain separated from their parents. The deadline a federal court set for them all to be reunited passed months ago. They didn't care about the kids, and they didn't care about the truth.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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