GOP leadership is awfully quiet about Trump destroying families

As the number of young children ripped from their parents along the southern U.S. border swells — nearly 2,000 kids in just 42 days this spring — GOP leaders remain mostly silent on the immoral Trump policy.

Despite the swirling outcry and widespread denunciations from religious leaders, Republican players such as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, along with their top deputies Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. John Cornyn, have had very little to say in public or on social media about the horrific practice.

In general, cable news airwaves in recent days have been bereft of Republican voices loudly cheering the idea of law enforcement destroying families in the name of “law and order.”

The silence is curious because in recent weeks, some Republicans in Congress have summoned a bit of courage and criticized another Trump policy: tariffs. Yet when it comes to ripping families apart, Republicans have gone silent.

The fact that Trump himself is lying and trying to blame Democrats for his inhumane policy is the best indication yet that the White House understands this issue is a political loser.

Whereas Republicans in the past have leaned into the issue of immigration and embraced radical rhetoric to inflame passions about a make-believe crisis along the southern border, that interest has suddenly evaporated.

“We don’t want kids to be separated from their parents,” was as much as Ryan could muster when questioned by reporters recently. Yet everyday kids are being separated from their parents because of Trump’s policy. But Ryan and other Republican leaders not only have done nothing to stop it, but they won’t even condemn it.

Republicans insisted a new immigration bill that they proposed this week would solve the family separation issue. But in reality, that bill was just the GOP trying to use defenseless kids as pawns as a way to leverage money for Trump’s wall.

Complicating matters, Trump signaled on Friday he doesn’t even support the GOP bill, though the White House later said he “misunderstood” the question and might sign it.

So the party is right back where it started and has no blueprint for how to shift the stunning storyline of the U.S. government purposefully ripping families apart.

Time and again we’ve seen how Trump’s radical immigration policy has been deeply out of step with the American public.

A poll this week found that voters in Ohio, a state Trump won by eight points in 2016, overwhelmingly approve of allowing so-called Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who were brought to America by their parents, to stay in the country.

As for tearing immigrant families apart, “Separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral,” stressed Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

To that, Republican leaders have no response.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.