White House misspells ‘separation’ on immigration executive order

The White House misspelt the word “separation” in the executive order Donald Trump signed ending the controversial policy of family separation at the Mexican border.

The order was titled “Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation” but initially spelt the last word “seperation”.

The misspelling was quickly corrected but screenshots of the blunder appeared on social media.

People rapidly noticed the glaring error, mocking the Trump administration which has gained a reputation for making grammatical mistakes.

The new “zero tolerance” immigration policy of splitting families at the US-Mexico border has sparked worldwide outrage and bipartisan criticism.

Between 5 May and 9 June of this year more than 2,000 children were separated under the scheme, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

After consistently defending the policy, Mr Trump finally succumbed to pressure and signed an order overturning the practice.

On Wednesday, the president said he “didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated”.

The White House said in a statement that the administration wanted to "maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources".

The president, who accused immigrants of “infesting” the country a day earlier, said the executive order was “about keeping families together, while at the same time being sure that we have a very powerful, very strong border”.

Mr Trump denied allegations he was performing a U-turn on his stringent immigration stance - telling reporters at the signing the southern border was “just as tough” as before.

Since May, the Trump administration has charged every adult caught crossing the border illegally entering the US at the Mexican border with federal crimes, instead of referring those with children mainly to immigration courts in the way that former administrations did.

Adult immigrants facing charges are housed separately from their children - resulting in the separation of parents from children reportedly as young as eight-months-old.

The Trump administration has been frequently mocked for its grammatical errors and the president has become famed for firing off rambling, inflammatory tweets – which include misspellings, typos and other linguistic errors – to his 53 million followers.

Typos penned by Mr Trump on Twitter include the famous “covfefe”, misspelling President Obama’s name as “Barrack”, “rediculous” and “politicons”. The White House misspelt the name of Theresa May multiple times in a memo in January.