…Nielsen said that previous administrations had also at times separated children from immigrant parents at the border, though “their rate was less than ours.”

“So I want to be clear on a couple of other things,” Nielsen said. “The vast majority, vast, vast majority of children who are in the care of H.H.S. right now — 10,000 of the 12,000 — were sent here alone by their parents. That is when they were separated. So somehow we’ve conflated everything.

“But there is two separate issues. 10,000 of those currently in custody were sent by their parents with strangers to undertake a completely dangerous and deadly travel alone. We now care for them. We have high standards. We give them meals, we give them education, we give them medical care. There is videos, there is TVs, I visited the detention centers myself — that would be my answer to that question.”

[….]

“But they absolutely did this. This is not new,” she said. The Trump administration, she said, was engaging in the practice more frequently because U.S. law forbids the government from detaining “family units” apprehended while crossing the border for longer than 20 days.

[….]

Nielsen described a crisis on the southwest U.S. border, where she said illegal crossings exceed 50,000 people a month — “multiples over each month last year.” Authorities have observed a 325 percent increase in crossings by unaccompanied children and 435 percent increase in crossings by families since this time last year. Asylum claims have surged 1,700 percent in the last decade, she said, creating a backlog of 600,000 cases.

CNN and Quinnipiac University each released polls on Monday showing that two-thirds of Americans oppose Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy for border crossings that has led to children being taken from their parents. But both organizations also found that a majority of Republicans support the policy.

ProPublica published a recording it said was made last week in a U.S. detention center in which 10 Central American children can be heard crying for their mothers and fathers. One unidentified Border Patrol agent remarks, “Well, we have an orchestra here. What’s missing is a conductor.”

Nielsen said she’s “not in any position to deal with hearsay stories. If someone has a specific allegation,” she said, “we will look into it. ”

[….]

Trump continued to blame Democrats, falsely, for a policy that even members of his own party said he could end with a single phone call.

The president said at a White House event on Monday that “all of the problems” the U.S. is having with immigration are “very strongly the Democrats’ fault.” He insisted again that his family separation policy was the consequence of “horrible laws” that the opposition party refused to agree to change.

“The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” Trump vowed. “You look at what’s happening in Europe, you look at what’s happening in other places; we can’t allow that to happen to the United States, not on my watch.”

[….]

Several Democrats have charged that Trump is attempting to use the children’s plight as leverage to force them to accept changes to immigration law they oppose, including construction of a wall on the Mexican border and curbing legal immigration.

“That’s a very cowardly response,” Nielsen said. “It’s clearly within their power to make the laws and change the laws. They should do so.”

After denying that the family separation policy existed in a tweet on Sunday, Nielsen defended it in a speech earlier on Monday in New Orleans and said border authorities “will not apologize for doing our job.” People seeking asylum in the U.S., she said, should go to official ports of entry instead of crossing the border illegally…