January 26, 2018
Peter Dujardin

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushed in Norfolk on Friday for new immigration restrictions and reforms that he contended would make America a safer place to live.

Sessions advocated for a border wall, an end to chain migration — whereby extended family members can come into the United States to join relatives already here — and a “merit-based” immigration system.

The comments — to a crowd consisting mainly of federal, state and local law enforcement officials at the downtown Slover Library — came three days before the Trump Administration submits a significant new immigration plan to Congress Monday.

The administration has vowed to provide a “path to citizenship” for an estimated 1.8 million immigrants who came to the United States as children. In return, the plan calls for $25 billion in funding for a border wall on the Mexican border, an end to chain migration and lottery selection system, among other changes.

The plan is expected to face stiff criticism from the left — from those opposed to the border wall and many of the other changes — and from the right — from those opposed to granting “amnesty” to anyone who came to the United States illegally, even as children.

But Sessions, who as recently as last summer was fighting to keep his job as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, is expected to be a key administration point man selling the reforms. “For a permanent fix to our immigration laws, Congress needs to act,” he said. “The American people have known for more than 30 years that our immigration system is broken.”

Sessions — whose speech inside the Slover Library was met with some protesters on East Plume Street outside — said there’s “nothing to apologize for” to advocate for a merit-based system of immigration, which he said means “welcoming the best and the brightest.” That would bring in people with education and skills -- a move that Sessions asserted would both help the country advance economically and boost national security.

That’s a better approach, he said, than randomized systems and those that select immigrants based on whether their extended relatives are already here.

“Employers don’t roll dice when deciding who they want to hire,” Sessions said. “Our incredible military doesn’t draw straws when deciding whom to accept. But for some reason, when we’re picking new Americans—the future of this country—our government uses a randomized lottery system and chain migration.”

Coming back to that system several times in his speech, he said that a merit-based system is “not unique.” It’s used in many countries around the world, to include Canada and Australia, with people chosen “based on their likelihood of assimilating, thriving, and contributing to society as a whole.”

A border wall on the Southern border — perhaps Trump’s biggest campaign promise in 2016 — “will make it harder and more expensive for illegal aliens to break our laws and smuggle drugs or even human beings into this country,” Sessions said. “The wall will send a message to the world that in the United States of America, we enforce our laws.”

Sessions also vowed to crack down on “sanctuary cities,” or cities that work to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, which he said places “an unfair burden on our federal agents.”

He said that law enforcement funding should only go to cities that “cooperate with immigration enforcement,” and said the Justice Department has requested documents from 23 cities across the country on how they are complying with the law. “If these cities want to receive law enforcement grants, they can,” he said. “They just have to stop impeding federal law enforcement.”

“We cannot continue giving federal grants to cities that actively undermine the safety of federal law officers and intentionally frustrate efforts to reduce crime in their own cities,” he said.

Sessions also spent part of his speech highlighting crimes committed by foreign nationals. He talked of some cases recently prosecuted in the Eastern District of Virginia, including the prosecutions of Sudanese nationals who were recently sentenced in Richmond and Northern Virginia for helping to fly others to go fight for ISIS.

A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, he said, found that the 40,000 “known or suspected aliens” are in federal prison, or 20 percent of the total prison population. That means, he said, that the immigrant share of the federal prison population is two thirds greater than their share of the population at large.

He said that another recent study, in Arizona, found that “illegal aliens are more than twice as likely to be convicted of crimes as Arizonans,” including being “twice as likely” to commit murder.

“Any crime committed by improperly vetted immigrants —and especially illegal aliens — is, by definition, preventable,” Sessions said.

Though Sessions seemed in good spirits on Friday, his very job seemed quite precarious as recently as last summer.

Trump said openly that he would not have appointed Sessions as attorney general had he known Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation, saying the AG’s decision to do so “was very unfair to the president.” Trump was also said to be seriously considering firing the longtime Alabama senator from his post, at one point saying, “We’ll see,” when asked if Sessions would keep his job.

But Sessions was able to save his post, boosted in large part by strong support from his large reservoir in the Senate who backed him. And his relationship with Trump has seemingly improved markedly in recent months, with Trump no longer deriding him publicly, saying Sessions has his full support — and now having Sessions sell his crucial immigration plan.

Though Sessions recused himself, of course, still oversees a Justice Department in the midst of the Russia saga. Sessions didn’t take any questions after his Norfolk speech Friday, and didn’t respond when a television news reporter asked him after the speech whether Trump had indeed attempted to fire Robert Mueller as the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe.

That was in response to news reports Friday that Trump had decided last summer to fire Mueller — but that the president backed off when his top lawyer threatened to quit his job rather than carry out an order he didn’t agree with.

Meanwhile, the FBI — the Justice Department’s biggest agency — is now facing growing charges of political bias at the top from some Congressional Republicans. That includes accusations that some of the agents involved in the Trump-Russia probe were biased, as evidences by newly uncovered text messages, and scrutiny over the backing agents had for getting warrants that were used to gather information on Trump campaign officials before the 2016 election.

Sessions addressed those various concerns in his speech Friday, too.

The first thing he thinks about “when I wake up in the morning,” he said, is getting the Justice Department “back to its fundamental mission of enforcing the law and protecting the safety of Americans with integrity and fairness.” The Justice Department, he said, doesn’t see questions from Congress as a bad thing, and said that “sunlight truly is the best disinfectant.”

And Sessions said he expects fairness and integrity from everyone in his department.

“It means absolutely eliminating political bias or favoritism — in either direction — from our investigations and prosecutions,” he said. “That sort of thinking is the antithesis of what the department stands for, and I won’t tolerate it. It means identifying mistakes of the past, and correcting them for the future. When we find problems, we’re addressing them head on, not sweeping them under the rug.”

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