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WASHINGTON — Republican senators moved on Tuesday to defuse a political crisis by seeking passage of legislation that would swiftly bring an end to President Trump’s practice of separating children from their parents when families cross into the United States illegally.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, said that “ all of the members of the Republican conference support a plan that keeps families together,” endorsing an approach that would provide legal authority to detain parents and children together while their legal status in the country is assessed by the courts.
Asylum claims would be expedited by adding more immigration judges or allowing families to be processed before others, Republican senators said.
Mr. McConnell said he planned to reach out to Democrats to support the effort, hoping to stanch the political damage from an administration policy that led to heartbreaking stories of children separated from their mothers and brutal images of children in makeshift detention camps.
But Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, immediately shot down the Republican approach, saying that Mr. Trump could — and should — use his executive authority, not legislation, to quickly end the family separations.
“There are so many obstacles to legislation, and when the president can do it with his own pen, it makes no sense,” Mr. Schumer said.
The Republican scramble emerged even as Mr. Trump remained defiant in the face of calls to abandon the “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border illegally, which forced officials to take children away from their parents.
In an afternoon speech, Mr. Trump continued to falsely blame Democrats for causing the family separations and dismissed as “crazy” several of the Republican proposals to address the issue by hiring hundreds of new immigration judges.
Rejecting a proposal by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to end family separations by increasing personnel in immigration courts with the hiring of up to 375 new judges, Mr. Trump suggested that many of the immigration judges could be corrupt, and he said some lawyers who appear in their courtrooms are “bad people.”
“They said, ‘Sir, we’d like to hire about five or six thousand more judges,’” Mr. Trump said in a long and rambling speech to the National Federation of Independent Business. “Five or six thousand? Now, can you imagine the graft that must take place? You’re all small-business owners, so I know you can’t imagine a thing like that would happen.”
Mr. Trump has for weeks been urging lawmakers to pass broad legislation to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, including hard-line changes that would crack down on asylum seekers, reduce visas and spend $25 billion to build a border wall. Doing so, he said, would have ended the need for a zero-tolerance policy by allowing families to be quickly deported.
Broad immigration legislation was supposed to be the subject of a meeting with Republican House members on Tuesday afternoon. But in his speech, the president also vowed to rewrite Republican immigration legislation to his liking.
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“We have a House that’s getting ready to finalize an immigration package that they are going to brief me on later, and I’m going to make changes,” Mr. Trump vowed, without providing details about what he plans to change.
Throughout the day, Mr. Trump gave no sign of relenting on his zero-tolerance policy that has led to more than 2,300 children being taken from their parents after crossing the border illegally, even as outrage has intensified.
The president once again blamed Democrats for supporting “crippling loopholes that cause family separation” and claimed without evidence that Democratic politicians are eager to let members of MS-13 and other violent gangs into the United States so they can eventually vote for them.
The president was greeted by enthusiastic applause throughout his speech to the crowd of mostly small-business executives.
But earlier, two other leading business groups — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable — condemned the practice of separating children from their parents. The Business Roundtable called it “cruel and contrary to American values.” The chamber’s top official said, “This is not who we are, and it must end now.”
Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, announced in a tweet on Tuesday that he would withdraw four members of the Maryland National Guard, and their helicopter, from the southern border until “this policy of separating children from their families has been rescinded.”
On Capitol Hill, the Republican backlash against Mr. Trump’s policy grew louder on Tuesday. Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, is asking his Senate colleagues to sign a letter to the Justice Department requesting a “pause on family separations” until Congress can pass legislation, a spokesman for the senator said on Tuesday. Mr. Hatch told reporters on Monday that the separation policy was “not American.”
“As I have said for the last several weeks,” Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement, “I oppose the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents. This is counter to our values.”
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said he was working on legislation that would keep families together while increasing the number of federal immigration judges so court hearings could be expedited.
“We’re overwhelming the system,” Mr. Johnson said. “We don’t enough have detention units for family units.” He added, “We would probably need to build more, identify more detention facilities, certify them so we can keep the families together.”
In the House, Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, also said on Tuesday that he would introduce a measure that “more easily allows for family units to stay together” as part of a legislative package to limit the number of asylum claims.
The issue of the family separation policy appeared poised to swamp Mr. Trump’s meeting with Republican lawmakers on Tuesday afternoon. The meeting had been set up to provide a presidential pep talk for broad immigration legislation that is scheduled to come to a vote on Thursday.
But members of the president’s party expressed deep concern about the need to move quickly to end the family separations, something that would be difficult to achieve as part of a debate over fixing the immigration system.
In a series of tweets on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump continued to falsely blame Democrats for forcing the separations and calling for Congress to enact hard-line changes to immigration laws that he says would make the zero-tolerance policy at the border unnecessary.
“Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!”
Mr. Trump noted in another tweet that most of the children in government custody arrived at the border over the last several years without parents, and were not affected by the recent change in policy.
“Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2000 are with their parents,” he tweeted.
Trump administration officials on Tuesday defended their treatment of children who had been separated from their parents at the border, describing a network of shelters in 17 states that provided education, counseling, health care services and playtime until children were reunited with their parents.
Officials from the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services insisted to reporters that the children in their custody were treated humanely. The officials said the president’s numbers were basically right. Of about 12,000 children in care in government facilities, officials said 2,342 were children who crossed the border illegally between May 5 and June 9 and were taken from a parent to allow the adult to be charged and detained.
Once the parents were taken away to detention, those children were reclassified by the government as “unaccompanied children,” and quickly sent to the Health and Human Services shelters.
But the officials disputed charges of mistreatment of those children, saying that the agencies were subject to strict rules about how children were cared for.
The facilities are “staffed by people who know how to deal with the needs, particularly of younger children,” said Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families. Mr. Wagner said that “the children in our care are receiving a full range of services.”
Officials could not provide statistics on how many very young children had been taken from their parents as part of the new policy, though they insisted that Border Patrol agents had discretion in how they treated what they called “tender-aged children,” which they defined as younger than 5.
They said that only teenagers were held temporarily in large intake centers in Texas and Florida that had been pictured in news reports recently. Younger children are taken to permanent shelters with more services, they said.
Officials also could not say how many children had been reunited with their parents, either because the parents were quickly deported or because the parents were released from custody for other reasons.
“I don’t know how many of the separated kids have been placed or reunited with parents,” Mr. Wagner said. “This policy is relatively new. We are still working through the experience of reuniting.”
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