Hillary Clinton Says Separating Families at Border Is `Horrific'

(Bloomberg) -- Hillary Clinton called the practice of separating immigrant families at the U.S. border a “moral and humanitarian crisis” and criticized her 2016 election opponent for allowing it.

“What’s happening to families at the border is horrific,” Clinton said Monday at an event in Manhattan hosted by the Women’s Forum of New York. “Every human being with a sense of compassion and decency should be outraged.”

President Donald Trump continued Monday to blame Democrats’ opposition to legislation that would curb legal immigration for his administration’s policy of separating child migrants from their parents at the Mexican border and said he would not allow the U.S. to become a “migrant camp.” There’s no law requiring children to be taken from parents apprehended after unlawfully crossing the border.

Clinton said she warned in the debates leading up to the 2016 election that Trump’s immigration policies would result in parents being separated from children. She said it’s an “outright lie” that immigration laws mandate splitting up families, and she criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s citation of the Bible in his defense of the policy.

“What is being done using the name of religion is contrary to everything I was ever taught,” she said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Emma Kinery in New York at ekinery@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Dan Reichl

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