'F-ing
Horrifying': Sessions Outlines Immigration
Crackdown in 'Trump Era'
Meanwhile, Trump appoints immigration hardliners
to key agency posts
By Deirdre Fulton
April
12/13, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "CD"
-
In "the Trump
era," as Attorney General Jeff Sessions called
it on Tuesday, immigration officials will
undertake a harsh crackdown on undocumented
migrants—a campaign one veteran federal
prosecutor
described as
"fucking horrifying."
In his speech at a border port of entry in
Nogales, Arizona, "[t]he nation's top law
enforcement official outlined a series of
changes that he said mark the start of a new
push to rid American cities and the border of
what he described as 'filth' brought on by drug
cartels and criminal organizations," the
Associated Press
reported.
"This is a new era," the
immigration hardliner
told Customs and Border Protection personnel.
"This is the Trump era. The lawlessness, the
abdication of the duty to enforce our
immigration laws, and the catch-and-release
practices of old are over."
Mother Jones
reported:
In
his remarks,
Sessions said nonviolent immigrants who
enter the country illegally for a second
time will no longer be charged with a
misdemeanor—they'll be charged with a
felony. He also recommended that prosecutors
charge "criminal aliens" with document fraud
and aggravated identity theft, which carries
a two-year minimum sentence. In January,
President Donald Trump expanded the
definition of which immigrants can be
considered "criminal"
to include anyone
who has committed "a chargeable criminal
offense," which could include sneaking
across the border.
As
he proposed stiffer penalties for nonviolent
immigrants, Sessions also targeted gangs and
cartels "that turn cities and suburbs into
war zones, that rape and kill innocent
citizens and who profit by smuggling poison
and other human beings across our borders."
Invoking unusually severe language in the
written version of his announcement,
Sessions proclaimed, "It is here, on this
sliver of land, where we first take our
stand against this filth."
(Politico
notes that the
term "filth," which appeared in prepared
remarks, was omitted from Sessions' speech when
he gave it.)
One anonymous federal prosecutor
told Daily
Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff
the directives
were generating widespread negative response:
"It's fucking horrifying. It's totally
horrifying and we're all terrified about it, and
we don't know what to do."
"The
things they want us to do are so horrifying—they
want to do harboring cases of three or more
people," the prosecutor continued. "So if you're
illegal and you bring your family over, then
you're harboring your kid and your wife, and you
can go to jail."
Others
blasted Sessions' inflammatory rhetoric.
"Attorney General Sessions is grandstanding at
the border in an attempt to look tough and scare
immigrants,"
said Frank
Sharry, executive director of the immigration
reform advocacy group America's Voice Education
Fund. "It's yet another example of the Trump
administration treating all immigrants as
threats and as criminals. This is the
smokescreen they use to justify their efforts to
deport millions, to keep people out of the
country, and, ultimately, to try and remake the
racial and ethnic composition of America."
Gregory
Z. Chen, director of government relations for
the American Immigration Lawyers Association,
added to the AP: "Once again, Attorney
General Sessions is scaring the public by
linking immigrants to criminals despite studies
showing that immigrants commit crimes at lower
rates than the native born."
|
No
Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media
|
Meanwhile, CNN
reports
Wednesday that the Trump administration's latest
immigration appointees are affiliated with
far-right, anti-immigration organizations.
According to CNN:
Jon
Feere, a former legal policy analyst for the
Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, has
been hired as an adviser to Thomas D. Homan,
the acting director of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, according to Homeland
Security spokesman David Lapan.
At
Customs and Border Protection, Julie
Kirchner, the former executive director of
the Federation for American Immigration
Reform, or FAIR, has been hired as an
adviser to Customs and Border Protection
acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, said
Lapan.
National Immigration Law Center executive
director Marielena Hincapié
said the
hirings "are more evidence that white
supremacists are now running our country's
immigration agenda."
"These
groups have spent 20 years looking for ways that
they could hurt immigrants," Lynn Tramonte,
deputy director of pro-immigration advocacy
group America's Voice, told CNN, "and
now they've been given the keys to the kingdom.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
See
also -
Tacoma Immigrant
Detainees to End Hunger Strike if Demands Met;
The detainees in the 1,575-bed ICE-run detention
center are striking against poor living
conditions such as food quality, access to
medical care, high commissary prices, levels of
hygiene in the facilities
