Michael D. Shear and Eileen Sullivan

The official said that President Donald Trump ordered a shake-up of his top immigration officials in recent days because they were moving too slowly, or even actively obstructing, the president’s desire to confront the surge of migrants at the southwestern border. The asylum changes are one of many policies the president wants to put into effect with a new team in place, the official said.

Trump denied on Tuesday that one of those changes would be to restart his policy of separating migrant families at the border, though he boasted that the act of taking children from their parents — which drew global condemnation before he abandoned it last summer — was effective.

“Now I’ll tell you something, once you don’t have it, that’s why you see many more people coming,” Trump said. “They are coming like it’s a picnic, because, ‘Let’s go to Disneyland.’”

The administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity even as Trump was making his remarks, said a modified version of family separation, in which parents are given a choice of whether to be separated or to accept indefinite detention alongside their children, continues to be under consideration.

But the so-called binary choice proposal is “not ripe for White House consideration,” he insisted, because the government does not currently have the detention space to hold families if the policy were put in place.

The asylum changes being envisioned could drastically alter the role that the United States plays as a refuge for people fleeing poverty, violence and war. U.S. and international laws require it to allow migrants to request asylum once they come to the country.

But the official said that an initial assessment of an asylum-seeker’s claim — known as a “credible fear” screening — too often accepts the claim that the migrant was persecuted. The official also said that many more asylum-seekers should be rejected during that first step.

Changes in the screening process could require more proof by asylum-seekers that they would be persecuted in their home countries, as well as more reliance on State Department assessments of the threats that exist in those countries.

Immigrant rights advocates have feared for months that the administration would try to change the standards by which asylum-seekers are judged in an effort to prevent more of them from coming into the United States.

The administration official blamed the delay in that effort on “deep state” bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security and even the president’s own political appointees in the department, whom the official described as lacking the management skills to push Trump’s agenda.

The official declined to name specific administration officials who have failed. But he made thinly veiled references to two top officials at the Department of Homeland Security: John Mitnick, the department’s general counsel, and L. Francis Cissna, the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

He said there was “clearly a track record” in which the president’s policies have not been advanced.

In his remarks on Tuesday, Trump falsely said that President Barack Obama had embraced the same policy of routinely separating migrant children from their parents at the border.

“President Obama had child separation,” Trump said during brief remarks in the Oval Office, where he was meeting with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt. “I’m the one that stopped it.”

Under Obama and President George W. Bush, immigration officials sometimes separated families when they had reason to question parentage or when there was evidence of child abuse. The Trump administration instituted a policy in which all families who crossed the border illegally were separated in order to allow the parents to be prosecuted under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents at the border before the president ended the policy in June 2018.

Trump’s comments come a day after he shook up the senior ranks of the Department of Homeland Security, forcing the resignation of the secretary and top immigration officials in a move that signaled a pending shift in immigration policies.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/us/politics/trump-obama-family-separation.html" id="4480944f-ec5c-3433-af7a-461885cf9c05">The New York Times</a>.

Trump Administration to Push for Tougher Asylum Rules

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration plans to aggressively push for tougher screening of asylum-seekers that will make it vastly more difficult for migrants to win protection in the United States from persecution in their home countries, a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday.

Trump denied on Tuesday that one of those changes would be to restart his policy of separating migrant families at the border, though he boasted that the act of taking children from their parents — which drew global condemnation — was effective.

But the so-called binary choice proposal is “not ripe for White House consideration,” he insisted, because the government does not currently have the detention space to hold families.

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Michael D. Shear and Eileen Sullivan

Articles written by the author

Trump Administration to Push for Tougher Asylum Rules

Trump Administration to Push for Tougher Asylum Rules