Jeff Sessions: His greatest policy triumph amounted to systemic child abuse

[riversedge]

https://newrepublic.com/article/152082/agony-malice-jeff-sessions-resigns-attorney-general

The Agony and Malice of Jeff Sessions
Trump's attorney general was forced out over the Russia investigation, but he should be remembered for the damage he did to people's lives.



By Matt Ford
November 7, 2018

Jeff Sessions, who resigned on Wednesday, ranked as one of the most regressive political figures to ever lead the Justice Department. .........................


His departure came as no surprise. President Donald Trump spent the last year and a half publicly railing against the former Alabama senator for his perceived disloyalty in the Russia investigation. Trump announced in September that he would not oust Sessions until after the midterm elections. His resignation, which Sessions pointedly noted was at Trump’s request in his letter, came less than 24 hours after the polls closed.

In a post on Twitter, Trump said that he was naming Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’s chief of staff, as acting attorney general until he names a permanent replacement. Whittaker is expected to be a loyal foot soldier in the interim period. In August 2017, he wrote an op-ed for CNN warning that special counsel Robert Mueller would be “going too far” if he investigated Trump’s personal finances.

Sessions’s departure marks an ignominious end for one of the president’s most effective Cabinet members. Not since A. Mitchell Palmer was the nation’s attorney general so singularly focused on imposing his own ideological vision on the rest of the nation. In the U.S. Senate, Sessions’s strident restrictionist views on immigration had been relegated to the ideological fringes. But as attorney general, he enjoyed unparalleled influence over the machinery of American immigration and wielded it against those hoping to build a better life for themselves in the United States.


His greatest policy triumph amounted to systemic child abuse. Sessions first announced the Trump administration’s campaign to separate migrant families at the border in May. He framed it as an effort to crack down on child trafficking, though the policy’s true purpose was to spread fear among migrants and inflict cruelty upon them. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” he declared. Thousands of children were ultimately separated from their parents, and hundreds have yet to be reunited.

The practice brought near-universal condemnation. Medical experts denounced the policy for the psychological trauma it inflicted on children. Former First Lady Laura Bush compared it to Japanese-American internment during World War II. So intense was the criticism that Trump backed down from the policy and signed an executive order to curb separations. But Sessions defended it by invoking a Biblical verse that urges obedience to government power..........................................