On Friday’s Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade defended President Donald Trump‘s border policies at one point by more or less saying, Hey, at least he’s not taking American kids away from their parents. 
 
 As Kilmeade spoke with his colleagues about the ongoing debate surrounding the immigration compromise bill being floated through Congress, he expressed support for Trump broadcasting a deterrent for Latin American migrants who wish to seek shelter in the United States. This tied in with a broader show of support for how Trump is enforcing the rule of law by taking border security seriously. 
 
 “Somebody has to deal with this issue,” Kilmeade said. “We just can’t let everybody in that wants to be here.” 
 
 Shortly after that, Kilmeade topped off his commentary with this statement: 
 
 “Like it or not, these aren’t our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country and now people are saying that they’re more important than people in our country who are paying taxes and who have needs as well.” 
 
 UPDATE: Kilmeade has offered a clarification for his remarks. 
 
 Watch above, via Fox News. 
 
 [Image via screengrab] 
 
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 >> Follow Ken Meyer (@KenMeyer91) on Twitter 
 
 Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com ||||| Co-host Ainsley Earhardt stated that Trump’s policy is in place to “vet who’s coming across the border, in case it’s MS-13 or drugs.” 
 
 Kilmeade went on, “Somebody has to deal with this issue. It doesn’t matter who the president is. If you don’t like his policy, he’s also open to your policy, rather than just criticizing his. He’s trying to send a message to the other countries, ‘this is not the way you do it,’ because this is a country that has rules and laws. We just can’t let everybody in that wants to be here.” 
 
 On Wednesday, the president signed an executive order he claimed would end the immigration policy he initiated that separated thousands of children from their parents at the United States-Mexico border. However, the executive order also aims to increase the government’s ability to detain kids with their parents indefinitely. 
 
 MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle ripped apart Kilmeade’s remarks on air, saying that she wanted to “point something out to our colleagues over at ‘Fox & Friends.’” ||||| The Trump administration’s move to separate immigrant families at the border and detain children apart from their parents spiraled into a humanitarian and political crisis Monday as the White House struggled to contain the growing public outcry. 
 
 The situation has become a moral test for President Trump and his administration. The president on Monday voiced defiance and continued to falsely blame congressional Democrats for what he decried as a “horrible and tough” situation. But Trump is empowered to immediately order border agents to stop separating families as a result of his “zero tolerance” enforcement policy. 
 
 The president asserted that the parents illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border with their children “could be murderers and thieves and so much else,” echoing his incendiary remarks about immigrants at his campaign launch in 2015. And in a series of dark tweets, he warned that undocumented immigrants could increase gang crime and usher in cultural changes. 
 
 “The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” Trump said in a midday speech. “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.” 
 
 More than 2,300 children were taken from their parents at the border between May 5 and June 9, according to statistics released Monday by the Department of Homeland Security, with the pace of family separations growing over that period to nearly 70 a day. 
 
 The separations were roundly condemned — including by all four living former first ladies — as cruel, inhumane and un-American. Administration officials rejected former first lady Laura Bush’s comparison of the detention centers to Japanese American internment camps during World War II. 
 
 [Laura Bush: Separating children from their parents at the border ‘breaks my heart’] 
 
 The White House said people killed by illegal immigrants were the true victims because they were “permanently” separated from their family members, even listing crimes in a document that Trump aides shared with allies. 
 
 Though the administration has tried to present a public picture of steely resolve — vowing not to apologize for enforcing the law, as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Monday — senior officials have disagreed behind the scenes about the merits and morality of separating children from their parents. 
 
 “Parents who entered illegally are, by definition, criminals,” Nielsen told reporters during an unusually contentious White House news briefing. “By entering our country illegally, often in dangerous circumstances, illegal immigrants have put their children at risk.” 
 
 Nielsen maintained that her agency was merely enforcing existing law and said it was up to Congress to change the policy. “It is the beginning of the unraveling of democracy when the body who makes the laws, instead of changing them, tells the enforcement body not to enforce the law,” she said. 
 
 
 
 Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen speaks during a contentious news briefing at the White House on Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) 
 
 But many lawmakers disagreed with that assessment. 
 
 “The White House can fix it if they want to,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). “I don’t think there’s any question about that.” 
 
 Nielsen also said the administration is not using its “zero tolerance” policy to pressure Congress to act on Trump’s broader immigration agenda or to deter migrants from coming to the country, contradicting comments from other administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and senior adviser Stephen Miller. 
 
 The crisis garnered round-the-clock television news coverage, with journalists reporting about their first glimpses of the ­concrete-floor and metal-cage conditions inside the detention centers. 
 
 Nielsen acknowledged that she was not keeping pace with coverage of the crisis, including audio of wailing children published a few hours earlier by ProPublica. She said she did not know why the administration had released images Sunday of young boys in cages at a Texas detention center but not of young girls. 
 
 Trump has been closely monitoring the coverage but has been suspicious of it, telling associates he believes that the media cherry-picks the most dramatic images and stories to portray his administration in a negative light, according to one senior administration official. 
 
 The images in the media contrast with more positive photos that Trump’s aides have shown the president depicting detained children smiling, playing video games and exercising outside, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. 
 
 Meanwhile, Trump and his advisers were unable to stanch the wellspring of public opposition. Some Republican elected officials joined Democrats in expressing moral outrage and calling for an immediate end to the administration’s family separation policy. 
 
 [Photos | This photographer spent a decade at the Mexico border. Here is what he saw.] 
 
 In an indication that GOP leaders fear negative ramifications in November’s midterm elections, Rep. Steve Stivers (Ohio), who chairs the House Republicans’ campaign arm, called on the administration to change its policy and “stop needlessly separating children from their families.” 
 
 Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said: “It’s time for this ugly and inhumane practice to end. Now.” He added, “It’s never acceptable to use kids as bargaining chips in political process.” 
 
 And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) tweeted: “The administration’s current family separation policy is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded. The administration has the power to rescind this policy. It should do so now.” 
 
 Two polls released Monday showed the public overwhelmingly against separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents at the border. A CNN survey found that 28 percent of Americans approve of the policy and 67 percent disapprove, while a Quinnipiac University poll had a similar finding, with 27 percent of voters approving of the policy and 66 percent disapproving. 
 
 Trump will head to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to meet with House Republicans and push for immigration legislation that would provide funding for his promised border wall, among other priorities. Senior administration officials suggested that the humanitarian crisis at the border was leverage to force legislators to pass such a law. 
 
 “We do not want to separate parents from their children,” Sessions, an architect and key defender of the policy, said in a speech Monday. “If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won’t face these terrible choices.” 
 
 House Republicans are expected to vote this week on two immigration bills: a hard-line measure drafted by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and a second bill cast as a compromise between the moderate and conservative wings of the GOP. 
 
 House leaders were rushing to insert provisions into both measures that would not separate families, according to a senior GOP aide, and allow children to be detained indefinitely with their parents. The prospect of passage for either bill is murky at best. If neither garners the necessary support, lawmakers would have to decide whether to introduce a stand-alone bill addressing family separation. 
 
 Trump’s position has been unclear. The president said in a television interview Friday that he would not sign “the more moderate” of the two measures, launching a day of confusion and chaos on Capitol Hill that forced White House officials to clarify that Trump, in fact, supported both bills. Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, Republicans said they hoped that Trump would personally deliver assurances that he backs their plan. 
 
 Senate Republicans also began working to draft a legislative fix to the growing family separation crisis, even as some in their ranks stressed that Trump had the power to reverse the practice himself. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said a “handful” of GOP senators had started to discuss a bill that would be “humane and compassionate but also allows the government to enforce the law.” 
 
 One of the other senators working on the fix, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), privately spoke with Nielsen on the phone about the unfolding crisis last Friday and said he was also reaching out to Democratic lawmakers about a bill that could pass. 
 
 “Every direction they go, it’s bad,” Lankford said of DHS officials. “That’s the challenge they have.” 
 
 The president considers immigration a winning issue for him politically, advisers said. He has complained repeatedly in recent months that he looks “weak” on border enforcement and has been concerned that his base could turn on him for not being tougher, according to a senior administration official. 
 
 A second administration official said Trump is in agreement with Miller, a hard-line influence in the administration, in believing that “if we’re having an argument on immigration, we always win because that’s our ground, no matter what the nuances of the argument are.” 
 
 White House officials have said there is no comprehensive strategy at play. “What’s the end game?” another senior administration official asked. 
 
 At a meeting with Sens. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) at the White House on Monday, Trump reupped his threat to shut down the government in September if he doesn’t get money for the border wall, according to two people familiar with the meeting. The president told the senators he was willing to take such a drastic action, these people said, and wanted his wall funding along with strong border security measures. 
 
 The issue of family separation was mentioned in passing, with Trump putting blame on Democrats. 
 
 Behind the scenes at the White House, aides scrambled Monday to manage the public relations fallout and rally support for their policy. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s daily briefing, first scheduled for 1:15 p.m., was pushed back to 3:30 p.m., then to 4, then to 5, so Nielsen could field questions at the lectern. She was at the White House around 1 p.m. doing extensive prep for the briefing and met with Trump at 3, according to a White House official. 
 
 [Facing outcry over family separations, DHS chief says, ‘We will not apologize’] 
 
 On Monday morning, administration officials from the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security briefed dozens of congressional aides to explain the “zero tolerance” policy in the face of mounting questions from Capitol Hill. 
 
 The White House distributed more than 3,000 words of talking points to Republican allies under the headline “Congressional Democrats’ Policies Are Responsible for the Border Crisis and Family Separations.” The talking points — which included repeated false claims and said that children were being treated well, calling reports of inhumane treatment “bunk” — were largely greeted with amazement, according to senior Republican aides. 
 
 Trump’s spokesmen doubled down on the president’s false contention that Democrats were to blame. The administration pointed to a 1997 legal agreement and a 2008 bipartisan anti- 
 
 human-trafficking bill as requiring the separation of families. But the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations did not share that interpretation. 
 
 Although Trump tweeted, “Change the laws!,” no law mandates that children be taken away from their parents after illegally crossing the border. And Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike contend that Trump could end the separations of his own accord. 
 
 Nielsen defended her agency’s practice of separating migrant families and accused the media and members of Congress of mischaracterizing the administration’s border crackdown. 
 
 “We will not apologize for the job we do, or the job law enforcement does, or the job the American people expect us to do,” Nielsen said in morning remarks to law enforcement officers in New Orleans. 
 
 Democrats, meanwhile, have escalated their campaign to denounce the separations. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and a handful of other Democratic lawmakers visited a detention facility in San Diego. 
 
 In the Senate, all 49 members of the Democratic caucus have endorsed a bill from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would explicitly bar DHS officials from taking children away from a parent at the border, absent evidence of trafficking or abuse. 
 
 And Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), an outspoken critic of the administration’s immigration enforcement policies, called on Nielsen to resign, saying her false and misleading public statements in recent days are “disqualifying.” 
 
 Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, said the American people should have expected the current crisis at the border because of Trump’s campaign proposals and rhetoric. 
 
 “I warned about this during the debates and on the campaign trail, that Trump’s immigration policies would entail families being separated,” Clinton said in a speech Monday. “Now, as we watch with broken hearts, that’s exactly what’s happening.” 
 
 Mike DeBonis, Nick Miroff and John Wagner contributed to this report. ||||| poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201806/2747/1155968404_5799880576001_5799877076001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true immigration Trump signs executive order halting family separations The furor over forcibly removing children from their parents prompted the administration to move without waiting for Congress. 
 
 President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that ends the administration’s policy of separating migrant families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, abandoning the president’s previous stance that only Congress can fix the problem. 
 
 “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office, flanked by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Vice President Mike Pence. “I think anybody with a heart would feel strongly about it. We don’t like to see families separated.” 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 Yet Trump said that he wanted to continue enforcing a strong policy at the border, an issue he campaigned on: “We are keeping a very powerful border and it continues to be a zero tolerance. We have zero tolerance for people that enter our country illegally.” 
 
 And the president continued to say that the underlying issue remains one for Congress to fix, titling the document an “executive order affording Congress an opportunity to address family separation.” 
 
 Administration officials also said that children who have already been separated from their parents won’t immediately be reunited, even if the parents remain in federal custody. 
 
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 “For the minors currently in the unaccompanied alien children program, the sponsorship process will proceed as usual,” Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department’s Administration for Children and Families, told POLITICO on Wednesday evening. 
 
 Another spokesman later said Wolfe had misspoken. 
 
 “It is still very early and we are awaiting guidance,” Brian Marriott, the HHS division’s senior director of communications, said in a statement. “Our focus is on continuing to provide quality services and care to the minors ... and reunifying minors with a relative or appropriate sponsor as we have done since HHS inherited the program. 
 
 “Reunification is always the ultimate goal of those entrusted with the care of UACs“ — unaccompanied alien children — “and the administration is working towards that for those UACs currently in HHS custody." 
 
 The executive order came after Trump and his team faced harsh criticism from lawmakers, activists, religious leaders and former first ladies over the separation of children from their parents in custody, which was panned almost universally as cruel and damaging to the kids’ well-being. 
 
 It was a remarkable shift from a president who is typically reluctant to bow to outside pressure. He often doubles down on his existing stance when confronted with criticism. 
 
 With cable news flashing images of migrant children held in cages and lawmakers’ offices facing a flood of angry phone calls, the president was under increased pressure to come up with a speedy solution. White House aides came to the conclusion on Wednesday that Congress was unlikely to act quickly to resolve the crisis, even though they sent signals that Trump would be willing to sign a narrow, stand-alone fix without other immigration-related provisions. 
 
 The decision to end the separation policy via executive action appeared to have happened quickly, and some in the White House were left in the dark. Key members of the White House legislative affairs team, which had been working with Hill lawmakers in a bid to find a legislative fix, were left out of the loop and hadn't seen text of the executive action as of early Wednesday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the issue. 
 
 Nielsen and Justice Department officials went to the White House Wednesday morning to work with administration lawyers to draft the order. The action will direct the Department of Homeland Security to keep families together and will instruct the Department of Defense to help house the families because many of the detention centers are at capacity, according to a person familiar with the matter. 
 
 Attorney General Jeff Sessions was slated to go to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to brief lawmakers on the administration’s plans. 
 
 Trump and his top aides, led by Nielsen, have been saying that the law requires them to separate children from parents who were being prosecuted for crossing the border illegally. 
 
 Nielsen and Trump repeatedly tried to blame Democrats for the situation at the border, saying that nothing could be done without a legislative resolution. But the separations were the direct result of a DOJ decision in April to prosecute border-crossers as criminals — a change Sessions described as “zero-tolerance.” The separation policy has been applied to most families detained at the border, with children handed over to federal welfare agencies after their parents are taken into custody by U.S. marshals. 
 
 Nielsen, who had expressed skepticism about moving forward with a zero-tolerance policy without action from Congress, has nonetheless become the public face of the crisis after defending the administration’s position during a tense briefing at the White House on Monday. On Tuesday night, protesters confronted her at a high-end Mexican restaurant in Washington. 
 
 Nielsen won’t abandon her demands for a legislative solution that would deal with family separations and accomplish Trump’s broader immigration agenda, according to a senior administration official. 
 
 “We’re still going to be pushing Congress to address this,” the official said. “That’s obvious and that’s not changing.” 
 
 The official said Nielsen was “a key player” in the talks at the White House on Wednesday morning, and had spent hours there. But the move appeared to take some Homeland Security Department officials by surprise. 
 
 The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement legal team wasn’t clued into the decision, according to a former DHS official with knowledge of the situation. “It sounds like they blindsided everybody,” this person said. “What changed in the last 12, 24 hours? … Either you believe that, operationally, this is what you need to be doing, or you don’t.” 
 
 ICE declined to comment, and several DHS component agencies did not immediately respond to related requests. 
 
 The executive action may not put an end to the question of how migrant children are handled at the border. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is already suing the administration on behalf of separated families, said prolonged detention of asylum seekers even as a unit would be unacceptable. “What we don’t want to see happen is we’ll keep the child and parent together but we’re going to detain them for a long time,” said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the nonprofit’s Immigrant Rights Project. “We don’t want to see a situation where they’re building more and more detention facilities. 
 
 Public outcry over the family separations reached new heights on Wednesday after The Associated Press reported that the administration is placing babies and toddlers in “tender age” shelters. The story capped a grim 24 hours that stood out as a low point even for a White House that long ago grew accustomed to operating in a perpetual state of crisis. 
 
 On Tuesday night, shortly before the AP story broke, Trump attended a $100,000-plus-per-person fundraiser at his hotel in Washington. Before that, he met with House Republicans at the Capitol, where he sounded off on everything from trade to fighter jets, while only briefly acknowledging the outcry over the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. 
 
 Yet on Wednesday, Trump announced he’d delay the annual congressional picnic at the White House, planned for Thursday. “I said, you know, it doesn't feel right to have a picnic for Congress when we're working on doing something very important,” he said in a meeting with lawmakers at the White House. “It didn’t feel exactly right to me.” 
 
 During the meeting, Trump said he hoped his action would be “matched by legislation.” 
 
 Behind the scenes, White House officials have grown increasingly concerned about the fallout from the policy. Trump, for his part, seemed to vacillate between doubling down on the policy and complaining that Democrats are using the issue to sabotage him politically, and signaling to aides that he wants the issue resolved. 
 
 “It’s the Democrats fault, they won’t give us the votes needed to pass good immigration legislation,” Trump tweeted Wednesday. “They want open borders, which breeds horrible crime. Republicans want security. But I am working on something — it never ends!” The president also retweeted a tweet by Darrell Scott, a pastor and Trump supporter, that declared, “Once the mid terms are over, liberals won’t talk about detained or separated illegal immigrant children until 2020. #itsallpolitics.” 
 
 poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201806/3051/1155968404_5799817983001_5799805714001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" 
 
 Earlier Wednesday morning, Trump again defended his border security policies, while bashing the news media. The tweet came one day after the president revived the divisive anti-immigration rhetoric that defined his presidential campaign, warning Tuesday on Twitter that immigrants would “infest“ the United States. 
 
 “The Fake News is not mentioning the safety and security of our Country when talking about illegal immigration,” he wrote on Twitter. “Our immigration laws are the weakest and worst anywhere in the world, and the Dems will do anything not to change them & to obstruct-want open borders which means crime!” 
 
 The swirling controversy has sparked tensions inside the White House and among Trump’s allies, again laying bare the divide between the president’s hard-line advisers, including policy aide Stephen Miller, and more moderate influences. 
 
 Trump told lawmakers on Tuesday that his daughter and adviser Ivanka — who was widely criticized after posting a photograph of herself cuddling with her infant son amid the crisis — had about the separations. Ivanka Trump tweeted on Wednesday, after the executive order was signed: “Thank you @POTUS for taking critical action ending family separation at our border. Congress must now act + find a lasting solution that is consistent with our shared values;the same values that so many come here seeking as they endeavor to create a better life for their families.” 
 
 A White House official said on Wednesday that first lady Melania Trump had also been arguing behind the scenes, including in direct conversations with her husband, to end the family separation policy. 
 
 But others close to the president had encouraged him to double down on the policy, arguing that border security was one of the central pillars of his campaign and is deeply popular with his conservative base. 
 
 “It’s a mess,” one former White House official said. 
 
 One Republican former Department of Homeland Security official who has ties to the Trump administration and asked for anonymity to talk about the policy put it bluntly: “I’m ashamed of what they’re doing.” 
 
 The White House faced a wave of damaging stories about the family separations — from leaked audio of children crying to the revelations about the high cost of detaining children alone. The AP story, which detailed “play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis,” struck a particular chord, prompting MSNBC host Rachel Maddow to break down in tears on her Tuesday night television show. 
 
 Trump’s critics also pounced on an offensive comment by Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Fox News. When Democratic strategist Zac Petkanas referenced a report that a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome was among the children who had been separated from her family at the border, Lewandowski could be heard saying, “Womp, womp,” later adding that immigrants give up rights when they cross the border illegally. 
 
 Lewandowski is still firmly in Trump’s inner circle as an informal adviser and recently joined Vice President Mike Pence’s political action committee. 
 
 In response to criticism of his remarks, Lewandowski complained Wednesday on Twitter that there was “lots of Fake News today” and argued he simply “mocked a liberal who attempted to politicize children as opposed to discussing the real issue which is fixing a broken immigration system.” 
 
 While some in Trump’s inner circle have defended the policy, lawmakers in both parties have condemned it. Even the pope has weighed in, telling Reuters that he agreed with recent comments by U.S. Roman Catholic bishops who called the policy “immoral.” 
 
 During her dinner at a Mexican restaurant on Tuesday night, one protester asked Nielsen, “How can you enjoy a Mexican dinner as you’re deporting and imprisoning tens of thousands of people who come here seeking asylum in the United States?” 
 
 Nielsen left the restaurant and a DHS spokesman later said: “While having a work dinner tonight, the secretary and her staff heard from a small group of protesters who share her concern with our current immigration laws that have created a crisis on our southern border. The secretary encourages all — including this group — who want to see an immigration system that works, that contributes to our economy, that protects our security, and that reflects our values to reach out to members of Congress and seek their support to close the terrible immigration loopholes that have made our system a mess.” 
 
 Ted Hesson, Rachael Bade, Eliana Johnson, Josh Gerstein and Stephanie Murray contributed to this report. ||||| A tweet by the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, about her ejection from a Virginia restaurant on Friday broke federal ethics rules, a leading expert said. 
 
 'All I hear is my daughter, crying': a Salvadoran father's plight after separation at border Read more 
 
 On Saturday, Sanders posted: “Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington [Virginia] to leave because I work for POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.” 
 
 Walter Shaub, federal ethics chief under Barack Obama and briefly Donald Trump and now a fierce critic of the administration, responded: “Sanders used her official govt account to condemn a private business for personal reasons … she can lob attacks on her own time but not using her official position.” 
 
 The controversy came at the end of a week of fierce debate over a Trump policy which mandated the separation of children from their parents when such families entered the US illegally. 
 
 Between April and early June, according to federal statistics, more than 2,300 children were taken. On Wednesday, amid international condemnation and with even Republican supporters in Congress beginning to waver, Trump signed an executive order nominally – but not conclusively – stopping the practice. 
 
 On Saturday, groups of Democrats visited federal facilities, seeking details about how the children will be reunited with their families. The Department of Homeland Security said it knew where all the children were and was working to reunite them. 
 
 On Sunday, Trump returned to the attack on Twitter, advocating the end of due process. “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our ountry,” the president wrote. “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.” 
 
 Amid the controversy over immigration, and mixed messages from the president about congressional efforts at reform, there has been no White House press briefing since Monday. Then, Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, addressed reporters on the separations policy. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Red Hen restaurant in downtown Lexington, Virginia. Photograph: Daniel Lin/AP 
 
 Nielsen and the policy adviser Stephen Miller both found themselves confronted by protesters in Mexican restaurants in Washington. The Red Hen seats 26 and serves “inspired Shenandoah cuisine” a three-hour drive from DC. Its owner told the Washington Post Sanders was served with a selection of cheeses before she decided, following a consultation with staff members, to ask her to leave the premises. 
 
 From El Salvador to the US: handcuffed at the border, separated for months Read more 
 
 “I was babbling a little,” Stephanie Wilkinson said, “but I got my point across in a polite and direct fashion. I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty and compassion and cooperation. I said, �?I’d like to ask you to leave.’” 
 
 Sanders, Wilkinson said, replied: “That’s fine. I’ll go.” Others at her table followed. Wilkinson said: “They offered to pay. I said, �?No. It’s on the house.’” 
 
 
 
 The owner added: “I would have done the same thing again. We just felt there are moments in time when people need to live their convictions. This appeared to be one.” 
 
 The story set off a Twitter battle between Trump supporters and opponents, many on both sides comparing it to a recent supreme court ruling that said the owner of a Colorado cake shop was right to refuse service to a gay couple, based on his religious beliefs. 
 
 Sanders’ father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, waded in, writing: “Bigotry. On the menu at Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington VA. Or you can ask for the �?Hate Plate’. And appetizers are �?small plates for small minds’.” 
 
 Newt Gingrich, a former Republican House speaker who many blame for US politics’ descent into vitriol and schism in the 1990s, wrote: “The increasing personal nastiness toward people who work for President Trump reflects the left’s understanding that they are losing. Nastiness reflects desperation, not strength. They can’t win the argument so they use nastiness. Sad and dangerous.” 
 
 Shaub launched a series of tweets of his own. 
 
 
 
 “Sarah,” he began. “I know you don’t care even a tiny little bit about the ethics rules, but using your official account for this is a clear violation … It’s the same as if [a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] agent pulled out his badge when a restaurant tried to throw him/her out. 
 
 Slaves knew 'the fearful anguish of broken hearts'. In Trump's America, migrants do too | Daina Ramey Berry Read more 
 
 “Sanders used her official gov[ernmen]t account to condemn a private business for personal reasons. Seeks to coerce business by using her office to get public to pressure it. Violates endorsements ban too.” 
 
 The Red Hen found itself at the centre of online efforts to boost or damage its customer reviews, hoax booking calls and differing opinions locally. Amid a media scrum, Tom Lomax, a local business owner, brought flowers as a show of support. 
 
 He called Wilkinson a “force of nature” and “one of the biggest drivers of the downtown” and told the Associated Press: “We support our own here, great little community we have.” 
 
 Stephen Russek, a former restaurant owner, said: “You have your political opinions, you don’t throw somebody out of your restaurant. They ought to be shut down.” 
 
 Shaub added: “There’s no ethics rule against Sarah Sanders fans being cartoonish hypocrites in defending merchants discriminating against gay people but howling when a merchant rejects a human rights violator based on her involvement in harming babies & children. Ridicule will have to suffice.” ||||| “What the administration has decided to do is to separate children from their parents to try to send a message that, if you cross the border with children, your children are going to be ripped away from you,” she said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “That is traumatizing to the children, who are innocent victims. And it is contrary to our values in this country.” 
 
 Former President Bill Clinton likewise spoke out, suggesting that Mr. Trump was using the widely denounced practice to leverage Democrats into accepting immigration limits in legislation they would otherwise oppose. 
 
 “These children should not be a negotiating tool,” he wrote on Twitter. “And reuniting them with their families would reaffirm America’s belief in & support for all parents who love their children.” 
 
 Hillary Clinton retweeted that message, adding, “YES!” 
 
 Contrary to the president’s public statements, no law requires families to necessarily be separated at the border. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s “zero tolerance” announcement this spring that the government will prosecute all unlawful immigrants as criminals set up a situation in which children are removed when their parents are taken into federal custody. 
 
 Previous administrations made exceptions to such prosecutions for adults traveling with minor children, but the Trump administration has said it will not do so. While the president has blamed Democrats, his senior adviser, Stephen Miller, told The New York Times last week that it was “a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period.” 
 
 But Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, rejected responsibility for the separations in a series of tweets on Sunday. “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border,” she wrote. “Period.” 
 
 She distinguished between asylum seekers who try to enter the country at designated points of entry and those who arrive at other parts of the border. “For those seeking asylum at ports of entry, we have continued the policy from previous Administrations and will only separate if the child is in danger, there is no custodial relationship between ‘family’ members, or if the adult has broken a law,” she wrote.
– The controversy over separating immigrant children from their parents continues, this time thanks to words from a Fox & Friends co-host. Per Mediaite, Brian Kilmeade took to the airwaves Friday morning, staunchly defending President Trump's moves on dealing with immigrants trying to enter the US. "He's trying to send a message to the other countries: This is not the way you do it, because this is a country that has rules and laws," he said to co-hosts Ainsley Earhardt and Steve Doocy. But it was his remarks on the separations specifically that raised the ire of many. "Like it or not, these aren't our kids," he noted. "Show 'em compassion, but it's not like [Trump] is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country." Twitter erupted in slams, while, per HuffPost, MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle addressed any insinuation that those opposed to Trump's moves care more about migrant kids than US kids: "Please … your propaganda, that anyone is putting the life of a migrant child ahead of the life of an American child, is simply nonsense. It's ignorant. It's stupid. It's wrong." Kilmeade later clarified his comments on Twitter, tweeting, "Of course-I didn't mean to make it seem like children coming into the U.S. illegally are less important because they live in another country. I have compassion for all children, especially for all the kids separated from their parents right now." He also said he was pleased kids were "on their way" to being reunited with their parents and put up a clip from his Fox News Radio show, where he reiterated, "All kids are important. All kids are special."