Outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly is blaming former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for a policy that led to the separations of thousands of migrant families at the southern border.
“What happened was Jeff Sessions, he was the one that instituted the zero-tolerance process on the border that resulted in both people being detained and the family separation,” Kelly told the Los Angeles Times.
{mosads}“He surprised us.”
“She is a good soldier; she took the face shot,” the unidentified official said.
“No one asked her to do it, but by the time we could put together a better strategy, she’d already owned it,” the official added.
A Government Accountability Office report earlier this year found that the Department of Health and Human Services and DHS were caught off-guard by Sessions’s memo on the zero tolerance policy.
The report concluded that the policy was flawed and that DHS was not “fully prepared” for the policy’s rollout.
President Trump and his administration faced bipartisan outrage earlier this year over the policy, which resulted in the separations of families who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump in the summer signed an executive order that halted the practice.
Sessions resigned as attorney general shortly after the midterm elections in November.