Trump claims if migrant families 'feel there will be separation, they don't come'

(Image credit: Olivier Douliery - Pool/Getty Images)

President Trump on Saturday confirmed The Washington Post's Friday report that his administration is considering ways to legally revive its suspended policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border.

"We're looking at a lot of different things having to do with illegal immigration," he said. "We're going to do whatever we can do to get it slowed down."

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Border apprehensions have increased this year after a decline in 2017; nevertheless, the larger trend is a marked decline over the past two decades. Many of the families separated were not illegal immigrants but asylum-seekers who attempted to enter the country legally. Several hundred children remain separated from their families months after the separation policy was shut down in court.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.