Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) slammed President Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday for using “cruelty to children” as a “tool of immigration policy.”
Coons appeared on CBS program “Face the Nation” to criticize Trump for stonewalling any bipartisan attempts to fix the crisis at the border.
“Several times many of us who have worked across the aisle on this issue have been deeply frustrated by the ways in which President Trump, after initially saying he would welcome a proposal, gets criticized for a day or two by the right wing and then reverses himself and campaigns against it or threatens to veto it,” Coons told CBS reporter Margaret Brennan.
“My concern here is that we’ve got an administration that has intentionally used cruelty to children as a tool of immigration policy,” the Delaware senator said later. “I’ll remind you that their zero tolerance policy that forcibly separated children from their parents at the border a year ago was a humanitarian disaster and faced a bipartisan outcry of both Republicans and Democrats.”
“So they don’t have a lot of moral authority to stand on in arguing that they would like Congress to give them an unlimited ability to detain children and their parents at the border,” he continued.
A new New York Times report detailed how the child migrant center in Clint, Texas has seen outbreaks of multiple diseases while the children forced to wear dirty clothes daily.
Watch Coons below:
Sen. Chris Coons: Trump administration has "intentionally used cruelty to children as a tool of immigration policy" pic.twitter.com/1W3tqwojaJ
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) July 7, 2019