Ivanka Trump Bravely Waits Until Her Father's Family Separation Policy Ends to Condemn It

By Katherine Krueger | August 2, 2018 | 2:40pm

White House

Today’s profile in courage comes from repeat bravery-doer Ivanka Trump, who told Axios’ resident access journalist Mike Allen on Thursday morning that her father’s policy of separating families at the border—one that the courts and activists effectively forced the administration to end—was in fact bad. In a sign of her boldness, Trump waited until the exact moment she could make the most impact on this issue—after there was nothing she could do about it—to speak out.

During the interview, Axios reported that Trump said she agrees with colleagues—she’s not even taking credit for reaching this conclusion herself!—“who describe family separation as ‘a low point in the White House.’”

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“That was a low point for me as well. I feel very strongly about that, and I am very vehemently against family separation and the separation of parents and children,” she said, adding that she is the “daughter of an immigrant” and echoing the administration’s line that America is “a country of laws.”

She continued: “These are not easy issues, these are incredibly difficult issues and like the rest of the country, I experience them in a very emotional way.”

You know who else experienced these issues in a “very emotional way”? The parents separated from their young children, some of whom have been reunited with them still deeply shaken from the experience. Other children were so understandably anxious and emotionally disturbed by the experience of being torn from their parents at the border that officials in at least one detention center took to drugging them, without consent from their parents, with powerful psychotropic medications. Still, even after Trump signed an executive order in June to keep families together—reversing course after intense backlash from both sides of the aisle—1 in 3 children who were separated still have not been reunited with their family’s by the court-ordered deadline, with no clear indication of when they will be.

But hey, it’s ever so quaint that Ivanka Trump was worrying about these families behind the scenes, and kind of her to take this moment to register that she was against her father’s inhumane policy all along. Let history keep the record straight.