immigration Trump signs executive order halting family separations The furor over forcibly removing children from their parents prompted the administration to move without waiting for Congress.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that ends the administration’s policy of separating migrant families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, abandoning the president’s previous stance that only Congress can fix the problem.

“I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office, flanked by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Vice President Mike Pence. “I think anybody with a heart would feel strongly about it. We don’t like to see families separated.”


Yet Trump said that he wanted to continue enforcing a strong policy at the border, an issue he campaigned on: “We are keeping a very powerful border and it continues to be a zero tolerance. We have zero tolerance for people that enter our country illegally.”

And the president continued to say that the underlying issue remains one for Congress to fix, titling the document an “executive order affording Congress an opportunity to address family separation.”

Administration officials also said that children who have already been separated from their parents won’t immediately be reunited, even if the parents remain in federal custody.

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“For the minors currently in the unaccompanied alien children program, the sponsorship process will proceed as usual,” Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department’s Administration for Children and Families, told POLITICO on Wednesday evening.

Another spokesman later said Wolfe had misspoken.

“It is still very early and we are awaiting guidance,” Brian Marriott, the HHS division’s senior director of communications, said in a statement. “Our focus is on continuing to provide quality services and care to the minors ... and reunifying minors with a relative or appropriate sponsor as we have done since HHS inherited the program.

“Reunification is always the ultimate goal of those entrusted with the care of UACs“ — unaccompanied alien children — “and the administration is working towards that for those UACs currently in HHS custody."

The executive order came after Trump and his team faced harsh criticism from lawmakers, activists, religious leaders and former first ladies over the separation of children from their parents in custody, which was panned almost universally as cruel and damaging to the kids’ well-being.

It was a remarkable shift from a president who is typically reluctant to bow to outside pressure. He often doubles down on his existing stance when confronted with criticism.

With cable news flashing images of migrant children held in cages and lawmakers’ offices facing a flood of angry phone calls, the president was under increased pressure to come up with a speedy solution. White House aides came to the conclusion on Wednesday that Congress was unlikely to act quickly to resolve the crisis, even though they sent signals that Trump would be willing to sign a narrow, stand-alone fix without other immigration-related provisions.

The decision to end the separation policy via executive action appeared to have happened quickly, and some in the White House were left in the dark. Key members of the White House legislative affairs team, which had been working with Hill lawmakers in a bid to find a legislative fix, were left out of the loop and hadn't seen text of the executive action as of early Wednesday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the issue.

Nielsen and Justice Department officials went to the White House Wednesday morning to work with administration lawyers to draft the order. The action will direct the Department of Homeland Security to keep families together and will instruct the Department of Defense to help house the families because many of the detention centers are at capacity, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was slated to go to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to brief lawmakers on the administration’s plans.

Trump and his top aides, led by Nielsen, have been saying that the law requires them to separate children from parents who were being prosecuted for crossing the border illegally.

Nielsen and Trump repeatedly tried to blame Democrats for the situation at the border, saying that nothing could be done without a legislative resolution. But the separations were the direct result of a DOJ decision in April to prosecute border-crossers as criminals — a change Sessions described as “zero-tolerance.” The separation policy has been applied to most families detained at the border, with children handed over to federal welfare agencies after their parents are taken into custody by U.S. marshals.

Nielsen, who had expressed skepticism about moving forward with a zero-tolerance policy without action from Congress, has nonetheless become the public face of the crisis after defending the administration’s position during a tense briefing at the White House on Monday. On Tuesday night, protesters confronted her at a high-end Mexican restaurant in Washington.

Nielsen won’t abandon her demands for a legislative solution that would deal with family separations and accomplish Trump’s broader immigration agenda, according to a senior administration official.

“We’re still going to be pushing Congress to address this,” the official said. “That’s obvious and that’s not changing.”

The official said Nielsen was “a key player” in the talks at the White House on Wednesday morning, and had spent hours there. But the move appeared to take some Homeland Security Department officials by surprise.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement legal team wasn’t clued into the decision, according to a former DHS official with knowledge of the situation. “It sounds like they blindsided everybody,” this person said. “What changed in the last 12, 24 hours? … Either you believe that, operationally, this is what you need to be doing, or you don’t.”

ICE declined to comment, and several DHS component agencies did not immediately respond to related requests.

The executive action may not put an end to the question of how migrant children are handled at the border. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is already suing the administration on behalf of separated families, said prolonged detention of asylum seekers even as a unit would be unacceptable. “What we don’t want to see happen is we’ll keep the child and parent together but we’re going to detain them for a long time,” said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the nonprofit’s Immigrant Rights Project. “We don’t want to see a situation where they’re building more and more detention facilities.

Public outcry over the family separations reached new heights on Wednesday after The Associated Press reported that the administration is placing babies and toddlers in “tender age” shelters. The story capped a grim 24 hours that stood out as a low point even for a White House that long ago grew accustomed to operating in a perpetual state of crisis.

On Tuesday night, shortly before the AP story broke, Trump attended a $100,000-plus-per-person fundraiser at his hotel in Washington. Before that, he met with House Republicans at the Capitol, where he sounded off on everything from trade to fighter jets, while only briefly acknowledging the outcry over the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Yet on Wednesday, Trump announced he’d delay the annual congressional picnic at the White House, planned for Thursday. “I said, you know, it doesn't feel right to have a picnic for Congress when we're working on doing something very important,” he said in a meeting with lawmakers at the White House. “It didn’t feel exactly right to me.”

During the meeting, Trump said he hoped his action would be “matched by legislation.”

Behind the scenes, White House officials have grown increasingly concerned about the fallout from the policy. Trump, for his part, seemed to vacillate between doubling down on the policy and complaining that Democrats are using the issue to sabotage him politically, and signaling to aides that he wants the issue resolved.

“It’s the Democrats fault, they won’t give us the votes needed to pass good immigration legislation,” Trump tweeted Wednesday. “They want open borders, which breeds horrible crime. Republicans want security. But I am working on something — it never ends!” The president also retweeted a tweet by Darrell Scott, a pastor and Trump supporter, that declared, “Once the mid terms are over, liberals won’t talk about detained or separated illegal immigrant children until 2020. #itsallpolitics.”

Earlier Wednesday morning, Trump again defended his border security policies, while bashing the news media. The tweet came one day after the president revived the divisive anti-immigration rhetoric that defined his presidential campaign, warning Tuesday on Twitter that immigrants would “infest“ the United States.

“The Fake News is not mentioning the safety and security of our Country when talking about illegal immigration,” he wrote on Twitter. “Our immigration laws are the weakest and worst anywhere in the world, and the Dems will do anything not to change them & to obstruct-want open borders which means crime!”

The swirling controversy has sparked tensions inside the White House and among Trump’s allies, again laying bare the divide between the president’s hard-line advisers, including policy aide Stephen Miller, and more moderate influences.

Trump told lawmakers on Tuesday that his daughter and adviser Ivanka — who was widely criticized after posting a photograph of herself cuddling with her infant son amid the crisis — had about the separations. Ivanka Trump tweeted on Wednesday, after the executive order was signed: “Thank you @POTUS for taking critical action ending family separation at our border. Congress must now act + find a lasting solution that is consistent with our shared values;the same values that so many come here seeking as they endeavor to create a better life for their families.”

A White House official said on Wednesday that first lady Melania Trump had also been arguing behind the scenes, including in direct conversations with her husband, to end the family separation policy.

But others close to the president had encouraged him to double down on the policy, arguing that border security was one of the central pillars of his campaign and is deeply popular with his conservative base.

“It’s a mess,” one former White House official said.

One Republican former Department of Homeland Security official who has ties to the Trump administration and asked for anonymity to talk about the policy put it bluntly: “I’m ashamed of what they’re doing.”

The White House faced a wave of damaging stories about the family separations — from leaked audio of children crying to the revelations about the high cost of detaining children alone. The AP story, which detailed “play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis,” struck a particular chord, prompting MSNBC host Rachel Maddow to break down in tears on her Tuesday night television show.

Trump’s critics also pounced on an offensive comment by Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Fox News. When Democratic strategist Zac Petkanas referenced a report that a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome was among the children who had been separated from her family at the border, Lewandowski could be heard saying, “Womp, womp,” later adding that immigrants give up rights when they cross the border illegally.

Lewandowski is still firmly in Trump’s inner circle as an informal adviser and recently joined Vice President Mike Pence’s political action committee.

In response to criticism of his remarks, Lewandowski complained Wednesday on Twitter that there was “lots of Fake News today” and argued he simply “mocked a liberal who attempted to politicize children as opposed to discussing the real issue which is fixing a broken immigration system.”

While some in Trump’s inner circle have defended the policy, lawmakers in both parties have condemned it. Even the pope has weighed in, telling Reuters that he agreed with recent comments by U.S. Roman Catholic bishops who called the policy “immoral.”

During her dinner at a Mexican restaurant on Tuesday night, one protester asked Nielsen, “How can you enjoy a Mexican dinner as you’re deporting and imprisoning tens of thousands of people who come here seeking asylum in the United States?”

Nielsen left the restaurant and a DHS spokesman later said: “While having a work dinner tonight, the secretary and her staff heard from a small group of protesters who share her concern with our current immigration laws that have created a crisis on our southern border. The secretary encourages all — including this group — who want to see an immigration system that works, that contributes to our economy, that protects our security, and that reflects our values to reach out to members of Congress and seek their support to close the terrible immigration loopholes that have made our system a mess.”

Ted Hesson, Rachael Bade, Eliana Johnson, Josh Gerstein and Stephanie Murray contributed to this report.