Transcript for DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen says separating kids at border isn't abuse

All right, so the battle over separating children from parents at the border rages on. A pediatrician who visited a detention center says the kids face lifelong psychological damage. Others call it child abuse. But homeland security secretary Kiersten Nielsen isn't backing down, saying she will not apologize. If you cross the border illegally you will be prosecuted. So it seems like the policy doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Nope. Well, there are people right now with senator Ted Cruz being at the top of this on the right saying that he wants to have an emergency bill to keep these families together. He wants to mandate that illegal immigrant families be kept together unless there are aggravated criminal conduct, authorize new shelters, provide asylum within 14 dice. Who said that? Ted Cruz. There is a lot of people pushing back on this. This morning I was watching -- there's a horrible audio coming out of children crying which I don't understand how you can listen to that and not feel differently about this but where the I vnk ka in all this. She has a white house role and a job and I'm interested that our whole platform has been women and mothers and she doesn't have anything to say in this. Trump's absence is more surprising. On the heels of a few weeks of saying he can pardon himself, pardon anyone, he could shoot Comey and get away with that. He has all the power in his hands and a problem comes and he says this isn't mine, it's congress. I also find Kiersten Nielsen enraging because this is a woman who keeps coming out to speak about this but she didn't realize that people from Norway were predominantly white. She also didn't know that more than 17 agencies, intelligence agencies came out saying that Russia had meddled in favor of trump. She also couldn't explain why she didn't know why there were no images of little girls in detention centers but then she reassures us that they are all being well taken care of. I have a hard time taking anything she says for truth. Since you brought up Norwegians, I was thinking if this were Norwegian kids would this be happening to them? Probably not, probably not. And I agree with you, Sara. What's strange to me is that everybody is talking about congress now passing some sort of bill that will end this policy. This president can end this policy right now. All he needs to do is say we are not going to do it, period. There is nothing else that needs to be done. Jeff sessions, quite frankly, can end the policy right now, the policy that he announced. What is interesting to me -- and I'm so proud of my former colleagues at the U.S. Attorney's office. 75 former U.S. Attorneys wrote a letter to Jeff sessions and made it very clear, the law does not require the systemic separation of families under these circumstances. The law does not require it. You have people like Laura Ingraham saying that it's like kids are in summer camp. I don't think they send 2-year-olds to summer camp, number one. They didn't put them in cages and put them all together. This other one Nielsen, what's her name, she says they're being treated really well, they have video games and movies and what have you. They don't have their parents. . If you don't have your mother, it doesn't matter. I watch -- I observe my grandson. You know, he's 7 years old. He likes to play minecraft when he's at my house but he wants us in the room with him, you know. Children want their parents. They want their grandparents there. I don't think in summer camp mothers were dragged out screaming, I want my child back. They were sending them to camp. Can I say one thing. I don't have to have a child to know that this is like -- Of course not. Not humane. You're right that president trump and Jeff sessions could possibly shut this down today but they're not going to. We have to rely on people like Ted Cruz and people on the forefront speaking out about this. While Laura Ingraham may be one person who, yes, has a primetime show but she dsn't speak for the entirety of the party. There's a lot of outrage. When you're seeing people like Bill O'Reilly coming out and saying this is wrong, you have a P.R. Problem. President trump has the highest approval rating, tied with Obama at the same time. I wanted to bring that up because what's interesting -- what's interesting is that they were saying that if you survey 905 people, quinnipiac, is that how you say it? Yeah. They say of those 905 but there are 327 million people in the country and I think it's a little bit of this is P.R. Because a lot of folks on the right, a lot of Republicans do not like what's happening. They don't like what they're seeing. What's great about it for me, this is how things change. When you put a face to something, I remember when I was a kid we only had three networks and one you had to get if you were on like a treadmill. But you saw what was happening down south with people getting hit with water hoses. You saw children getting hit. You saw adults getting hit because they wanted to go and vote and people started to say, well, how would I feel if I wanted to vote and I couldn't. I feel like these visuals of us seeing these children being separated and seeing the children separated is going to help us as Americans. Whether you're left or right, as an American, this has to piss you off. This should piss you off. I mean, this is beyond -- this is beyond left, right, center, middle. This is an American issue and if you don't see -- I mean, because we say Obama was able to deport a whole bunch of people, more people than anybody else as president. And we never had this. But he didn't separate families. You can deport without doing this. I have a question. My question about these Republicans that you're talking about, Bill O'Reilly, et cetera, are they informing the American public that this is not for the Democrats to fix? Does America know that this is strictly a trump rule? I think the fact that senator Cruz is having a, quote, emergency bill right now, I think he understands that and I think many people party do. There are a lot of people on the left that want open borders. They want amnesty and the debate over what kind of immigration we have in this country will rage on but on a basic level -- Ted Cruz by the way is very hard on this issue. When you don't want to have families separated there's a difference between keeping families together. That doesn't mean they're automatically going to come into the country and automatically get citizenship. I think that's what's being misconstrued. If you're disgusted by this and automatically it means you want open borders. I do not want open borders. Of course not. Think about it, again, Obama was able to do this -- and by the way -- And George W. Too I believe. But he did not do it this way. So I'm just saying, this is not -- this is, again, it's not left or right or center. This is American and this is wrong.

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