SAN DIEGO — Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance declined on Friday to rule out the use of family separations — a policy from Donald Trump’s first term in office — if he and the former president win back the White House, even as Homeland Security officials are currently working to reunify over 1,000 children with their families.
“When the media says family separation, look — every time that somebody’s arrested for a crime, that’s family separation,” Vance told NBC News speaking with reporters during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If a guy commits gun violence and is taken to prison, that’s family separation, which, of course, is tragic for the children, but you’ve got to prosecute criminals, and you have to enforce the law,” he continued. “The real family separation policy is when you don’t enforce the border, like Kamala Harris has refused to do.”
The Trump campaign has brought the issue of border security to the forefront of their messaging, honing much of its fire on President Joe Biden’s administration for its handling of the southern border — despite illegal crossings falling to their lowest number of Biden’s term in June.
In a televised town hall in May 2023, Trump also declined to say whether he would eschew the separation policy, despite describing it as “harsh.”
“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” Trump told CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins in the early weeks of his 2024 presidential bid.
“If the family hears that they are going to be separated, they love their family. They don’t come,” he continued. When pressed explicitly on whether he would bring back the practice, Trump replied: “We have to save our country, alright?”
In an interview with NBC News during a recent visit to the border in Arizona, Trump said “provisions will be made, but we have to get the criminals out,” when pressed on whether his plans for a mass deportation of undocumented migrants — a hallmark of his 2024 campaign — would include separating families.
More than 5,000 families were separated under the former president’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy implemented in 2018, but because the Trump administration did not maintain records of which children were separated and where they were sent, the task force and lawyers working on behalf of separated families have had a difficult time identifying families in order to offer them the chance of reunification.
According to a Department of Homeland Security report published this year, there are still 1,360 children “without confirmed reunifications.”
Now, with the possibility of a second Trump administration looming large, some of the children who were affected by the practice are speaking out about their experience in a social media campaign launched in advance of the November election and backed by immigration advocacy groups including FWD.us.
Billy, one of the teens featured in the project who did not provide his last name, recounted in a recorded clip how he was separated from his father after crossing the border, left with little agency or information.
“I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t do nothing at all but just sit back and watch my dad being taken away from me,” he said, adding that he was told he would “never see his family again” during the process. By his estimate, he was reunited with his father 30 days after being transported from the border to New York.
“My hope,” Billy said, is that “nobody goes through anything that happened to me again.”
Another teen, who does not provide his name, describes a similar circumstance in a separate post. He described being moved individually to New York, and though he was in intermittent contact with members of family over the course of a month apart, he was only allowed to see his father after a week of being held in the same detention center upon his return.
“I’m telling this story now because we cannot keep having that same problem,” he said. “We need to end family separation now and forever,” he added.
Vice President Kamala Harris, for her part, has said that she would bring back the bipartisan border security bill that failed in the Senate earlier this year after Trump urged congressional Republicans to tank the negotiations. The compromise bill — despite being one of the most conservative bills on border security in modern U.S. history — did not go as far as to call for family separation. As a senator — and later as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary — Harris was outspoken against the practice, describing the separations as “punitive” and lacking a “humanitarian approach.”
