Jeff Sessions Warns Law Enforcement About Children and Other Dangers
PoliticsA day after Jeff Sessions defended the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents by citing a verse from the New Testament, the attorney general spoke about immigration and the Department of Justice’s commitment to “restoring the rule of law in our immigration system” in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
During his speech, Sessions recited from a well-rehearsed script, repeating talking points central to the administration’s worldview and subsequent policies. Sessions warned of the “tens of thousands” of undocumented workers crossing American borders, conflating immigrants with criminals. He spoke of the “shootings, stabbings, and beatings,” as well as the rapes and murders committed by MS-13, the Trump administration’s preferred monster. Sessions warned in his speech that the gang was “recruiting illegal aliens as young as 15.” Danger, it seems, lurked in every corner. He warned, too, that the “porous” Southwest border was impacting the rest of the United States, telling law enforcement in the audience that the lack of security at the border “makes your job that much harder.”
But if Sessions was keen to warn of the dangers at the border, he was also eager to say that the danger often has an innocent face—positing a clear relationship between crime and undocumented children. Though he did not address the administration’s policy of family separation directly, he warned of undocumented teens being recruited by MS-13 and spoke of dangerous drug-running teens at the Texas border. “As just one example, in April, we arrested a teen trying to enter the country carrying 14 pounds of fentanyl across the border,” Sessions said. “Fentanyl kills more Americans than any other drug” He continued: “It killed about 20,000 Americans in 2016. A fatal dose is about three milligrams—which means that the 14 pounds smuggled by that illegal alien could potentially be enough to kill millions of people,” juxtaposing, in clear terms, the “illegal alien”—foreign, if not subhuman—doing the killing and the “people” doing the dying.