Ivanka Trump addressed family separation at the border again in an interview on Thursday, this time placing the blame for families being ripped apart on immigrant parents.
“I am a daughter of an immigrant, my mother grew up in Communist Czech Republic, but we are a country of laws. ... We have to be very careful about incentivizing behavior that puts children at risk of being trafficked, at risk of entering this country with coyotes or making an incredibly dangerous journey alone,” President Donald Trump’s daughter said at an Axios event in Washington, D.C.
The White House senior adviser said that the family separation policy was “a low point” for her.
“I feel very strongly about that, and I am very vehemently against family separation and the separation of parents and children ... I think immigration is incredibly complex as a topic, illegal immigration is incredibly complicated,” Ivanka Trump said, adding later that these aren’t “easy issues.”
“These are incredibly difficult issues and like the rest of the country, I experience them in a very emotional way,” she said.
Ivanka Trump’s remarks on family separation are convoluted in several ways. For one, by saying that the policy “was a low point” intimates that family separation at the border is a thing of the past. The administration is still actively working on reuniting families after Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy spurred the separation of thousands of children from their families.
The policy was not only a creation made entirely by the Trump administration, but one that the president continued to go ahead with even after members of his team warned that it would be a bad idea.
Though the president backtracked on his own policy and issued an executive order in June to stop the separations, many families aren’t being reunited unless the parent agrees to deportation or a family member within the country takes the child into their care. There are hundreds of kids who remain apart from their parents.
Ivanka Trump hadn’t commented on the policy at all until after the executive order was issued. Even then, her remarks weren’t on the practice’s problems, but rather a thank-you for her father’s order.
In addition to addressing the family separation policy, Ivanka Trump was asked on Thursday about whether she’s spoken with Robert Mueller or knew about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting attended by her brother Donald Trump Jr. She said “no” to both.
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