Top House Dem: GOP promoting ‘psychological torture’ of kids on border

The head of the House Democratic Caucus said Wednesday that President Trump’s policy of separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border is tantamount to torture.

Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) maintained that Trump could reverse the strict new policy in an instant — “if he wanted to” — while also hammering Republicans on Capitol Hill for going soft on their White House ally at the expense of children’s health.

“It is psychological torture, what this administration is doing,” Crowley said at a press briefing outside the Capitol, “and Republicans in Congress are tolerating it. They are promoting it — promoting psychological torture, among these young children.

“It is a scar not only out their lives, but on the country we love.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) piled on, lamenting that the United States under Trump has become “a country that institutionalizes child abuse.”

“Do you know what happens when a nursing mother’s child is taken away? The pain … in her breasts. The leaking of milk. The reminder of every minute that she has been separated from her child. Her whole body is crying out for that child,” Schakowsky said through tears.

“How can America stand it?”

The new “zero tolerance” immigration policy adopted last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions dictates that all adults attempting to cross the border illegally — even those trying for the first time — will face criminal prosecutions. Because children may not be detained in a criminal setting, any kids traveling with apprehended adults are separated and transferred to the Health and Human Services Department, which operates under a different set of guidelines.

The policy is a shift away from the more lenient approach of past presidents of both parties, who largely reserved criminal charges for repeat offenders and other more serious cases, which allowed first-time offenders to remain with their kids.

Trump and top administration officials have defended the new policy, maintaining it’s both a needed deterrent to would-be migrants and a legal obligation dictated by existing law.

Trump on Tuesday said “you have to take children away” in order to secure the criminal prosecutions of illegal border crossers who “infest our country.” He also falsely placed the blame on Democrats, who control neither chamber of Congress nor the White House.

Both the policy and the full-throated defense fit the hard-line approach to immigration enforcement that helped Trump win the White House in 2016, and both will resonate with his largely white conservative base.

But the growing outcry against the separations has become a political disaster for Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, who were already grappling with legislation focused on undocumented immigrants brought to the country as kids and were forced Tuesday to tweak their “Dreamer” legislation to include new provisions to keep migrant families together.

“We can enforce our immigration laws without breaking families apart,” Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters in the Capitol Wednesday.

“The administration says it wants Congress to act, and we are.”

Those bills are scheduled for votes on the House floor on Thursday, but there are growing signs that both will fail, leaving open questions about the fate of both the separated kids at the border and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which Trump is fighting to rescind.

Meanwhile, a host of medical groups — including the American Medical Association (AMA), American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics — have all condemned the separation policy, warning of lasting harm to the affected children.

“It is well known that childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences created by inhumane treatment often create negative health impacts that can last an individual’s entire lifespan,” the AMA’s James Madara wrote Wednesday to top administration officials.

Democrats are vowing they’ll only increase the pressure on the administration and congressional Republicans to reverse the policy in the days to come.

“If we fail to do it,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), “history will not be kind to us.”