WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump directed his administration on Wednesday to try to detain asylum-seeking families together, a reversal after weeks in which he insisted he had no choice but to separate children and adults who cross the border.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers wrestled with demands that they take action of their own to end family separations and pass broader immigration legislation, ahead of contentious votes on a pair of bills scheduled for Thursday.

In an executive order, Mr. Trump said families seeking asylum should be detained together when “appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.”

He kept in place the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, instituted earlier in the spring, of prosecuting adults who attempt illegal entry into the U.S. That policy provoked a political outcry when it led to the separation of thousands of children from adults who were arriving at the southern border.

“We’re going to keep families together, but the border’s going to be just as tough as it’s been,” Mr. Trump said of the order at a campaign-style rally Wednesday night in Duluth, Minn.

It remained unclear how the order would overcome significant legal and logistical hurdles, or how it would affect the more than 2,300 children already separated from adults who had been apprehended.


A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for the separated children, said Wednesday night the agency is still “awaiting further guidance on the matter” and that a spokesman had earlier misspoke in saying that existing cases would be unaffected by the order.

A longstanding federal-court settlement—known as the Flores agreement—bars the government from jailing migrant children. The move by the administration to continue arresting adults while keeping their children with them in custody could run afoul of that settlement.

In the order, the Republican president directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to try to modify that court settlement to enable officials to detain families together for the duration of their immigration proceedings.

Legal experts said that would set the stage for the same court battles that President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration fought and lost when it tried to jail migrant families together for more than 20 days.

A Honduran family trying to seek asylum in the U.S. after fleeing gang violence waited Wednesday at a shelter in Reynosa, Mexico. Photo: Ginnette Riquelme for The Wall Street Journal

Gene Hamilton, a counselor to Mr. Sessions, said the executive order was legal but stressed that it would be up to Congress to create a permanent resolution. He said the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department would be working closely together to implement the policy, but declined to offer specifics.


In the order, which Mr. Trump signed while flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the president also instructed the Pentagon to make facilities available for the housing and care of immigrant families.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Wednesday that the Pentagon stood ready to help. A U.S. defense official said the Pentagon hadn’t been asked for the use of any military facility thus far, but was expecting a request shortly as existing migrant facilities reach capacity.

Government officials have looked at buildings at three sites: Goodfellow Air Force Base and Dyess Air Force Base, both in Texas, and Fort Bliss Army base, which straddles the border of Texas and New Mexico, the defense official said. Officials this week considered a fourth installation, Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas.

As late as Tuesday, Mr. Trump and top administration officials refused to entertain suggestions that they take executive actions to end the family separations, instead calling on Congress to pass legislation.

Mr. Trump said Tuesday he saw only two options available to the administration—“totally open borders or criminal prosecution for lawbreaking”—with only Congress able to provide a third option to detain and remove families “together as a unit.”


The president and Republicans had come under growing pressure after images and audio recordings surfaced of some of the 2,342 children the administration has said were separated from adults and placed in government facilities since the policy took effect.

In response, many GOP lawmakers pushed for legislative measures that would detain families intact at the border. Democrats had broadly sought to allow families to be released into the U.S. together while their cases are adjudicated.

GOP lawmakers met with Mr. Trump Tuesday night and again Wednesday morning. Mr. Trump said he had seen, and been horrified, by some images of the detained children.

“The president just wants it all: He wants to keep families together, he wants zero tolerance and everything else,” a White House official said Wednesday. “And this is what it looks like when you try to get it.”

Congress has failed to pass bipartisan legislation on immigration partly because the issue mobilizes base voters. The Wall Street Journal's Gerald F. Seib explains. Photo: Getty

The White House’s reversal was welcomed by Republicans on Capitol Hill. But it also raised a host of questions about whether Congress still needed to legislate, whether a new system for keeping families together would end up amounting to indefinite detention while their cases are adjudicated, and how the government would reunify families already split apart.

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“I’m very pleased if the executive order brings a halt to this inhumane, traumatizing experience for these children, but it might be helpful for Congress to define better the rules of the road,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine), who signed a letter earlier this week urging Mr. Trump to put the practice of family separation on hold.


“President Trump’s executive order merely replaces one inhumane act with another,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). “In response to the overwhelming public outrage at his administration’s policy of tearing children away from their parents at the border, this administration thinks the appropriate response is to indefinitely detain families.”

The hastily announced White House decision also threw off a House Republican strategy for winning support for a compromise immigration bill, which House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) had said earlier Wednesday would be subject to a vote Thursday.

House Republican leaders had portrayed a provision in the bill that would end the family separation as a selling point, but by the afternoon top Republicans were recalibrating their pitch.

As Republicans sought to keep up with the fast-moving changes on immigration policy, their leaders were working to shore up support for a compromise measure that faces its own hurdles to passage.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R., La.) gave the White House a list of Republicans with whom Mr. Trump personally needed to meet and arranged to bring the holdouts to the White House on Wednesday, according to a House GOP aide.

One of the thorniest outstanding issues was the ability of Dreamers, the young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, to sponsor their parents for citizenship.

—Vivian Salama, Michael C. Bender, and Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com, Siobhan Hughes at siobhan.hughes@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

The name of Dyess Air Force Base was misspelled as Dyees in an earlier version of this article. (June 20, 2018)