Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley thinks Kirstjen Nielsen lied to Congress about family separation

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) dropped a bombshell Thursday, and he thinks it could saddle one Trump administration official with perjury charges.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has consistently maintained that the Trump administration has never had a policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. She tweeted it in June 2018, and told it to Congress as recently as last month.

But the December 2017 memo Merkley released Thursday shows otherwise. In the draft memo, senior DHS and Justice Department officials can be seen discussing a legal route to separating migrant families long before it decided on the zero tolerance policy that ultimately split them, CNN notes. That means Nielsen may have "committed perjury" when testifying to Congress in December, Merkley wrote in a Friday letter asking the FBI to investigate Nielsen's claim.

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The zero tolerance policy led to at least 2,700 children being separated from their families, the Trump administration has decided. But a Thursday report from the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general shows the actual number of split children is probably "thousands" higher, seeing as the Office of Refugee Resettlement said it saw a "steep increase" in family separations that started in summer 2017, the report said.