Read on Twitter
Thread: I wrote this story about the separation of children from parents during the first week of May 2018. It leads with Russia (not such a great move in retrospect) because I was trying to put this weird idea into context 1/ https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/taking-children-from-their-parents-is-a-form-of-state-terror
But the reason I wrote this then was that AG Jeff Sessions spoke at a law-enforcement conference on May 7 and pledged to prosecute adults crossing the border without a visa and to take away their children. This was reported by The Washington Post: 2/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-says-justice-dept-will-prosecute-every-person-who-crosses-border-unlawfully/2018/05/07/e1312b7e-5216-11e8-9c91-7dab596e8252_story.html?noredirect=on
3/ Sessions was not announcing a new policy or practice. The idea had germinated inside ICE the previous year, and The Times reported on that in December 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/us/trump-immigrant-families-separate.html
4/ Even by the time that Times piece came out, the practice already existed and migrant rights groups were talking about it. In March '18, the ACLU sued the Trump administration on behalf of families that had been separated as early as September '17 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-children/detained-immigrants-separated-from-children-in-u-s-sue-trump-administration-idUSKCN1GL2PI
5/ Today's Times piece, relying on a draft IG report, recasts this history, saying that Sessions "distanced himself" from the policy and presenting notes from statements he made in May 2018 as though they exposed him. There are a bunch of things wrong with this:
6/ The thing is, it didn't start in May 2018, and it wasn't a secret. Sessions didn't hide it. No one really hid it. We knew. We knew, and it took another whole year for reporting from concentration camps for kids to penetrate our consciousness
7/7 and for @AOC and others to call them what they are. We knew, and writing about it now as though it had been a secret elides that fact. Stop talking about secrets. Talk about what's out in the open. Most of it is.
