'I Don't Think Anybody Anticipated How Far the Administration Would Go'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : Border Patrol was totally overwhelmed at the time.
50% : Tom Homan, who was the head of ICE, and a man named Kevin McAleenan, who was the head of Customs and Border Protection, very quickly reraise this concept that they had already talked about and already favored.
46% : But the forcible separation of children from their parents is just not something that the Border Patrol has ever engaged in in American history.
46% : The idea actually came from within the border-enforcement apparatus: a man named Tom Homan, who started out as a Border Patrol agent in his early 20s, spent a career in enforcement, and ultimately became the head of ICE under President Trump.
46% : I was shocked that, to this day, many people involved in this decision making still don't understand how immigration enforcement works.
42% : It was the harshest application any of us have seen of this basic concept of prevention by deterrence, which is how we approach immigration enforcement generally.
42% : He first came up with the idea to separate families as an escalation of the concept of prevention by deterrence: this idea of introducing consequences to discourage illegal border crossing, even when it's for the purposes of seeking asylum.
40% : Trump comes into office and is visiting Border Patrol headquarters and Customs and Border Protection headquarters and saying, "Hey, we've got to shut this border down, and, really, we'll stop at nothing to do it.
36% : When you leave this to the Border Patrol, the solution that they come up with time and again is punishment.

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