Rather, from the Black Belt in Alabama in the 1980s to the farthest reaches of the border fence today, the Sessions Doctrine is the endgame of a long legal tradition of undermining minority civil rights.
Sessions has recently pushed for changes in the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the immigration-court system embedded within the DOJ. He’s considering ways to force judges to process more deportation cases, changes that several experts say will undoubtedly mean that fewer people receive due process or fair hearings.
The attorney general has also moved to firmly limit asylum grants, and last week announced that he could effectively eliminate the ability of immigrants who face domestic or gang violence back home to successfully apply for asylum.
Sessions successfully pushed Trump to end the Obama “catch and release” policy, under which unverified immigrants arrested in the immigration dragnet were let go before trial, and has enforced the “zero tolerance” policy in its place, one detaining all arrested immigrants pending trial.
Sessions made clear he believed that so-called sanctuary cities and unverified immigrants had essentially imported the opioid problem into the U.S. In retaliation for such cities’ continued refusal to enforce strict federal immigration detentions and referrals, Sessions has fought to strip them of certain avenues of federal-grant funding.
In rescinding former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’s private-prison memo, Sessions did not mention the OIG’s report, or any of the allegations of brutality and misconduct in private prisons. He merely stated that the policy “impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.”
According to Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017, the pace and extent of retrenchment under the first year of Sessions’s tenure have been extraordinary. “This DOJ and Jeff Sessions are rolling back civil-rights progress and undermining fundamental American values of equality and justice in a fairly unprecedented manner,” Gupta told me. “Across every issue, from criminal-justice reform to voting rights to LGBTQ rights, the attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow, and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all.”
As the state’s attorney general, he pushed an expansive capital-punishment agenda, fighting to execute some intellectually disabled people.
Sessions supported a failed bill to execute people who received two or more serious drug offenses. And as a ProPublica investigation chronicles, while the state attorney general, Sessions also fought a long legal battle against a court order seeking to equalize funding for Alabama’s still-segregated schools.
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