WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, government accountability group Restore Public Trust panned President Trump’s reported choice of Ken Cuccinelli for a key immigration policy job. In 2018, Cuccinelli, a former Virginia Attorney General and failed gubernatorial candidate, made excuses for the Trump administration’s widely criticized family separation immigration policy and bemoaned the President’s decision to sign an executive order bringing it to an end.
“When just about everyone in the country was encouraging Trump to abandon his horrific family separation immigration policy, Ken Cuccinelli was making the case for it to continue,” said Karl Frisch, a spokesperson for Restore Public Trust. “Children have been abused and sexually assaulted. Some have even died. Ken Cuccinelli’s fundamentally flawed assessment of this mean-spirited policy should disqualify him from government service.”
BACKGROUND
Cuccinelli Called Trump Executive Order Ending Family Separations “Very Logistically Challenging” Under Flores Agreement: “Are You Going To Enforce The Law With Everything That Entails Or Aren’t You?” In A June 2018 appearance on CNN, Cuccinelli said, “I do think there’s a broader question. It does come down to, to use one example there, Brooke, of are you going to enforce the law with everything that entails or aren’t you? So now the president is going to come out with, you know, an executive order where we will keep families together even while detaining them. That sounds to me very logistically challenging, particularly under the Flores settlement you were talking about with an earlier guest, where they have 20 days to process families that have children. Otherwise, they have to release the children. So now you create — you have solved one small problem, and/or large – for each family it’s big deal, obviously — but you have created a new one. And people should know, here it is, late June, come the middle of July or possibly the end of July, you will probably see a preliminary injunction in the DACA case that will end DACA as well.” [CNN Newsroom, 6/20/18]
Cuccinelli Blamed Obama Administration For “Encouraging These Families To Come And Encouraging Parents To Use Their Children As Essentially A Bargaining Chip To Get Into This Country.” “The settlement has them only release the children, which raises interesting questions. I have a funny feeling a lot of people on the left will be perfectly happy to have them released, even though they won’t have their parents. Their parents will be held. They will be released into the United States. The question I keep seeing asked, why don’t they reunite them and send them across the border they came in. I think you will hear that question rise more and more and more. And the system we have — the Obama administration owns a lot of the recent ramp-up of this. They have the responsibility for it. Is encouraging these families to come and encouraging parents to use their children as essentially a bargaining chip to get into this country. And you can say other people on the other side of the immigration policy debate see this kind of pressure as another form of leverage in the other direction. And I think both are correct. Both sides are doing that.” [CNN Newsroom, 6/20/18]
