U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) believes that former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald J. Trump do not actually support Christian values.
Jones in a Facebook livestream on Wednesday morning was asked by The Montgomery Advertiser to respond to a report released the day prior by The New York Times.
The report, which did not utilize any direct sourcing, outlined that Sessions and his administration at the Department of Justice had decreed that immigration law should be uniformly enforced, whether or not undocumented aliens had children or not. The report asserts that Sessions was acting at Trump’s direction, implementing a “zero tolerance” policy on immigration violations. It also claims that Sessions and other administration officials believed that separating parents from their children would deter future illegal immigration.
“I think it was horrible,” Jones reacted on Wednesday.
“That policy, and I’ve said this before, this should come as no surprise that the Trump administration and the former attorney general did something like this,” he continued. “It is so inconsistent with the values of people in Alabama. It is so inconsistent with the Christian values that they pretend that they support. And I say ‘pretend,’ because there is no way you can reconcile ripping away an infant from a mother’s arms with the Christian values we have here in the state of Alabama. No way. There’s no way.”
Sessions was not quoted in the report Jones referenced.
However, Sessions has previously written, “When I took over the Department of Justice, I reversed Obama Administration policies that unfairly targeted Christian and conservative organizations, and I made it the policy of the U.S. Government to defend people of faith in every court in our nation. The liberal press attacked me, but I didn’t care — I stood up for Alabama values.”
“Make no mistake — the Democrats in Washington are seeking to fundamentally redefine America, change our ideals, and divide us from each other,” Sessions has said. “Senator Doug Jones is a radical liberal who voted against Justice Kavanaugh and who would certainly vote for Chuck Schumer to be majority leader in the Senate. We must defeat him.”
Watch (Jones’ relevant comments after the 52:10 mark):
This comes after Jones last week defended sanctuary cities while alleging that Trump “hasn’t protected any borders.”
A third party group previously released a television ad in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race reminding voters that Jones opposed funding a wall on the United States-Mexico border and that the senator voted to terminate Trump’s declaration that an emergency existed at the border.
The same group, “One Nation,” has also hit Jones in a separate ad for voting to continue federal funding for sanctuary cities.
Sean Ross is the editor of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn