More than 40 civil and immigrant rights groups are calling on top companies not to hire Trump officials who helped carry out the administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy, writing in an open letter sent to all Fortune 500 CEOs that these former and current toadies “should not be allowed to seek refuge in your boardrooms or corner offices.”
The demand, featured in a full-page New York Times ad on Sunday, name-checks more than two dozen administration officials, including White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House aide Stephen Miller, and Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, who resigned that very day, and whose public image is already being rehabbed.
The forcible separation of families at the southern border has been a crime against humanity that has earned the United States numerous rebukes from the United Nations, and no amount of rehabilitation can erase this stain from the hands of the likes of Nielsen. “There are some lines,” the groups say, “that simply cannot be crossed.”
“Many of you spoke out against this barbaric policy,” they write. “However strong the opposition, your words are meaningless unless they are backed up with resolute action. We call on you to make it clear that you will not hire for employment, contract for consulting, or seat on your boards, anyone involved in the development or implementation of the Trump administration’s family separation immigration policy.”
The letter coincided with the one-year anniversary of former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III issuing the policy. However, families were being separated at the border before that, and now the administration is claiming it could take up to two years to sift through tens of thousands of government records to track down potentially thousands of families. Family separation remains a crisis, and companies should know that the officials who created it will carry that stain with them.