Ivanka Trump says she was 'very vehemently' opposed to separation of families

Ivanka Trump departed from the president on Thursday during an interview session, and called the separation of families crossing into the United States a low point for the administration.

"I am very vehemently against family separation and the separation of parents and children," the mother-of-three said at an event hosted by the website Axios.

President Donald Trump's administration announced a "zero tolerance" approach to crossings between ports of entry in the spring, choosing to prosecute adults and separate any accompanying minors.

The president at first tried to blame the Democrats, but amidst an outcry from human rights activists and criticism from a number of Republicans, later signed an executive order to end the practice. As of a court-mandated deadline last week, there were still some 700 cases in which reunifications had not taken place, including about 430 in which adults had already been deported.

Noting that her mother was an immigrant who came to the United States legally, Ivanka Trump did agree with her father by stressing the U.S. was a "country of laws."

She said: "we have to be very careful about incentivizing behaviour that puts children at risk of being trafficked, risk of entering this country with coyotes or making an incredibly dangerous journey alone."

Press attacks continue from White House

A senior White House adviser who was speaking at Thursday's event to highlight the administration's initiatives on workforce development, she also told interviewer Mike Allen she does not agree that the news media are "the enemy of the people."

Trump said she held that view even though she has been the subject of reporting that she knows "not to be fully accurate."

The president has broadly labelled the news media the "enemy of the people" and regularly accuses reporters of spreading "fake news" — his term for stories he dislikes.

On high points for the administration, she cited the president commuting the sentence of Alice Johnson, a woman serving a life sentence for drug offences whose case had been championed by reality TV star Kim Kardashian West.

She called Johnson leaving prison "one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen."

While Ivanka Trump was conciliatory towards the media, her father and his press secretary refused to give an inch later in the day.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to distance herself from Trump's previous assertions that the media is the "enemy" of the American people. Pressed during a White House briefing on the issue, Sanders said Trump "has made his position known."

In a heated exchange with reporters, she recited a litany of complaints against the press and blamed the media for inflaming tensions in the country.

Later Thursday night, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump ripped the "fake, fake, disgusting news."

"Whatever happened to the free press? Whatever happened to honest reporting?" Trump asked, pointing to the media in the back of the hall in Wilkes-Barre. "They don't report it. They only make up stories."

In Berlin on Thursday, experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights condemned what they describe as "strategic" attacks on the press by the U.S. president.

In a joint statement, two experts on freedom of expression — David Kaye, appointed by the UN body, and the Inter-American Commission's Edison Lanza — wrote that "these attacks run counter to the country's obligations to respect press freedom and international human rights law."

They said Trump's "attacks are strategic, designed to undermine confidence in reporting and raise doubts about verifiable facts."

They added: "he has failed to show even once that specific reporting has been driven by any untoward motivations."