Former President George W. Bush is “disturbed” by the “rhetoric” in the current immigration debate.
Bush attended an event at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark., on Thursday with former President Bill Clinton, CNN reported.
He said the current immigration debate “undermines the goodness of America.”
{mosads}”I think it doesn’t recognize the valuable contributions that immigrants make to our society,” Bush said. “And it obscures the fact — the rhetoric does — that the system is broken and needs to be fixed.”
There has been a national debate over handling immigration after the Trump administration implemented what it calls a “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute all adult migrants who enter the country illegally.
There was outrage after the policy led to more than 2,000 migrant children being separated from their parents. Children were detained separately under the policy.
Trump signed an executive order last month to end the practice and a federal judge in California ordered the administration to reunite all the families.
The administration said on Thursday — two days after the court-ordered deadline — that all “eligible” children under the age of 5 had been reunited with their families.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 57 children out of 103 in its custody were reunified with their parents.