Jeff Sessions' Rationale for Ending DACA Is a Gigantic Bucket of Horseshit
By JAY WILLIS
Attorney General Jeff Sessions made President Trump's decision to rescind DACA official this morning, announcing that the federal government would accept no new permit applications and would subject the program to an "orderly wind-down" before its scheduled expiration date of March 5, 2018. This is a gratuitously barbaric stunt with nothing in its "PRO" column except for "It will probably cause white people who are afraid of brown people to pump their fists wildly," and even for Sessions—a man who the United States Senate once essentially decided was too racist to be a federal judge—the rationales he offered at today's press conference were spectacularly dishonest.
First, the attorney generally forcefully declared that DACA has denied jobs to "hundreds of thousands" of Americans, an assertion he apparently makes based on the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of DACA permit-holders who have jobs, all of which he assumes will instantaneously and effortlessly flow to American citizens as soon as the policy is rescinded, or something. Even right-leaning think tanks warn that terminating DACA would eliminate jobs, devastate employers, and reduce economic growth by $280 billion over the next ten years, but Jeff Sessions has never been one to allow details to get in the way of a compelling nativist narrative, and he's sure as hell not about to start now.
From there, Sessions continued playing the hits, strenuously arguing that expelling DACA permit-holders—again, many of whom are children—from the country is vital to protecting Americans from "crime, violence, and terrorism," alluding marauding bands of criminal undocumented immigrants about which Sessions loves to speak in the direst of tones, but which exist only in the attorney general's wildest post-apocalyptic fever dreams. This is a pernicious, slanderous, race-baiting lie: Anyone convicted of a felony, a "significant" misdemeanor, or multiple misdemeanors of any type is ineligible to obtain a DACA permit, but Sessions knows well that if being truthful about the facts would immediately cause his argument to collapse, blowing his trusty dog whistle as loudly and forcefully as he can is his next-best option. "The compassionate thing to do is end the lawlessness and enforce our laws," he said, while peering sternly over his glasses, ably demonstrating in one sentence that his grasp of the definitions of both "compassionate" and "lawlessness" is shaky at best.
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https://www.gq.com/story/jeff-sessions-daca-announcement/amp
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