Protester interrupts Nielsen hearing

A protester shouting about family separations briefly interrupted a committee hearing Wednesday featuring Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

“United States takes U.S. citizen children from their parents as well,” exclaimed the protester.

“They put them with domestic abusers,” she added as she was escorted out of the House Homeland Security Committee hearing.

{mosads}The outburst happened as Nielsen and Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) discussed a procedural issue.

Nielsen’s testimony before the House panel has touched on family separations that resulted from the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy and other cases in which deportees who were not legal U.S. residents were returned to their home countries without their U.S.-citizen children.

Nielsen defended the zero-tolerance policy, which is no longer in effect, under which all adults who crossed the border illegally were detained pending trial, regardless of whether they were traveling as part of a family unit.

“In the United States, we do not put children in jail with their parents,” said Nielsen.