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In the early hours of Sunday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting hundreds of Guatemalan minors who entered the United States alone. The emergency order came after attorneys for the children argued their clients would face “abuse, neglect, persecution, or torture” if they were returned to Guatemala.
News of the administration’s latest mass deportation effort came under immediate criticism, including from the co-hosts of “The Weeknight.” During a discussion Tuesday, Michael Steele blasted the administration’s attempt, noting that it took place “in the cover of darkness on a holiday weekend.”
“They don’t think the American people will be sympathetic to children being snatched up in the middle of the night, put on a plane and shipped back to a country that they escaped or were sent from because their families wanted to protect them?” Steele asked. “I think somebody does need to at least ask the government, ‘Why did you feel the need to snatch these kids into the night?’”
Steele said the cruelty of the administration’s immigration crackdown shouldn’t come as a surprise. He connected the latest efforts to the family separation policy of Donald Trump’s first term. “You saw them the first time they put them in cages.”
Symone Sanders Townsend also weighed in and argued that mass deportations do little to address the underlying reasons that many migrants enter the country illegally. “When I worked in the White House, I worked on the root cause of migration,” Sanders Townsend said, noting how turbulence in the Northern Triangle countries — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — contributes to mass migration to the U.S.
The former Biden official said the Trump administration should focus on helping to improve the economic situation in countries like Guatemala and on coordinating with it “so that people are not sending their children on a dangerous journey.”
Alicia Menendez concluded the discussion by rebuking the administration for being more concerned with arbitrary deportation quotas over the well-being of children: “I know that Stephen Miller and Tom Homan want to hit their numbers, but these aren’t numbers, these are children.”
You can watch the full analysis from Steele, Sanders Townsend and Menendez in the clip at the top of the page.