Stephen Colbert Torches Kirstjen Nielsen for Defending Border Separation Policy

When the White House delayed Monday’s press briefing by nearly four hours on Monday, it seemed for a moment as if the Trump administration might actually announce a change to its “inhumane” policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. Instead, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen emerged to double down on what the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics has called a “form of child abuse.”

Referring to Nielsen as “definitely not the descendant of immigrants,” the Late Show host first read a tweet from the secretary that read, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”

“Then why are you locking up kids in an abandoned Walmart. Question mark. Exclamation point. Colon: with your head up it,” Colbert shot back.

Even worse was the “shocking claim” made by Nielsen on Monday that “we do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are, in fact, a family.”

“Yes, who can tell if these weeping toddlers are part of a family?” Colbert asked. “They might not even be toddlers. They might be adults with shoes on their knees.”

The host also went after Trump administration adviser Stephen Miller, who was revealed this weekend to be a driving force behind the policy, which he characterized as a “potent tool in a severely limited arsenal of strategies for stopping migrants from flooding across the border.”

“Which is fitting, because I always thought of Stephen Miller as a ‘potent tool,’” Colbert added.