Former U.S. Attorney General and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Mobile), four years removed from public service, continues to sound the alarm over crime and illegal immigration.
Throughout his two decades in the upper chamber of Congress, Sessions staked his claim as a border security hawk and an anti-illegal immigration hardliner. As attorney general during the Trump administration, Sessions used his office as a means to defend the president’s border security policies.
Sessions, now a mere governmental observer, routinely opines on what he views as significant issues facing the United States.
In a recent interview with the Center for Immigration Studies’ “Parsing Immigration Policy” podcast, Sessions gave his analysis of the Biden administration’s handling of the border crisis.
The Trump administration’s successful border security strategy, according to Sessions, has been squandered by the Biden White House.
“It’s difficult to overstate how tough it was for the Trump administration to make the progress. Lawsuits were filed, of course. As attorney general, we dealt with them and defended the president’s actions,” Sessions told host Mark Krikorian. “We began to win cases and change policies. The success was real and numbers fell.
“And it was thrown away by this administration. What they did exceeds anything imaginable to me.”
The number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border stands at nearly 8,000 per day, according to data obtained by NBC News. The recent spike in illegal border entries, Sessions said, can be attributed to the Biden administration’s reversal of Trump-era border policies.
“The numbers now are worse than they were when President Trump first took over. They were bad then, and it was a crisis then,” he said. “They threw away the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, they reversed some of the opinions I issued as attorney general that were rational, legal and proper. They just reversed them. Anything they can do to stop day one the wall construction … It’s just one of the amazing, irresponsible, anti-law things I’ve ever seen in my life in Washington.”
Sessions, who formerly served as a U.S. attorney and Alabama’s chief law enforcement officer, asserted that the national crime spike was due in part to illegal immigration.
“I’m telling you, what they’ve done on crime was predictable and was a disaster. And the president should be standing firm against it,” he said. “Last year, the FBI statistics recorded the highest increase in crime in 60 years … Part of that’s driven by criminals coming in from abroad illegally. We’ve joked in Alabama about going to Texas. When you got in trouble with the law in Alabama, the local sheriff would say, ‘You could go to Texas and we won’t put you in jail.’
“You know, in poor countries they don’t keep people in jail 30, 40 years. So they’re glad to get rid of them. So, if you’re a child molester and the sheriff and police chief in Honduras know you, what are you going to do? You’ve got a cousin in Los Angeles. You just go across the border. So, I think we’re picking up a larger number of criminals than we used to in the immigration system.”
Sessions warned that the Biden administration’s lax border policies could serve to incentivize foreign nationals from across the globe, rather than just Latin America, to enter the nation illegally.
“I have a sense that the whole world is just learning that it’s not just Mexicans in Central America that can come illegally,” he said. “They can come illegally, too. And so we may be facing a flow from the Middle East and the Libyas and places like that that we’ve never seen before as they learn how to do it.”
Dylan Smith is the editor of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @DylanSmithAL
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