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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Jeff Sessions’s Radical Immigration Policies
00:18:10
President Trump has struggled to fulfill several of his campaign pledges, but in one area his Administration has made considerable headway: his Attorney General is leading a brutal crackdown on undocumented migrants. Jonathan Blitzer joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the Administration’s radical reimagining of immigration policy.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:17]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, June 14th. Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Donald Trump said again recently that he wished he hadn't named Jeff Sessions as his attorney general. Yet no one in his administration has been more successful in implementing a defining plank of Trumpism. Over the last year and a half, Sessions has led a hardline crackdown on illegal immigration. Last month, he announced a zero tolerance policy, instructing ICE agents to separate parents from their children when apprehending families at the border. This week, he announced that victims of domestic abuse and gang violence will be ineligible for protection under U.S. asylum law. On Monday, Sessions explained the new policy when he spoke at a conference of immigration judges.
- [02:11]
Jeff Sessions
I have put in place a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry on our Southwest border. If you cross the Southwest border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It's that simple. If someone is smuggling illegal aliens across our southwest border, then we won't prosecute. Period.
- [02:33]
Dorothy Wickenden
Jonathan Blitzer joins me to discuss how Trump And Sessions are radically rewriting immigration policy and reversing decades of progress toward bipartisan immigration reform. John, welcome.
- [02:45]
Jonathan Blitzer
Thanks, Dorothy. Thanks for having me.
- [02:47]
Dorothy Wickenden
The papers have been filled in recent weeks with immigration horror stories about teenagers who've always lived in the US Being sent back to Central America to uncertain fates, some of them are killed. About immigration officers boarding trains and requesting passengers. Papers about women who've been brutalized by husbands who are members of drug cartels being denied asylum, and parents on the brink of deportation who can't get officials to tell them where their children. Last week, in a period of just two weeks, the Times reported, more than 650 children were forcibly taken from their parents. So tell us, how did this come to be?
- [03:29]
Jonathan Blitzer
The family separation policy began actually late last year in the summer of 2017. One of the things that began to happen was that Jeff Sessions decided he wanted to more systematically prosecute people who crossed the border, in his eyes, unlawfully, illegally. Now, that's a problem because one of the ways that someone can get asylum coming into the US Is to cross the border not at a port of entry, but at some irregular place along the US Mexico border and say, immediately upon being apprehended, I want asylum. To Jeff Sessions, this is a problem. This is example. This is an example of an asylum loophole that he wants to close. And so his policy from the very start was to encourage US Attorneys to prosecute any border crosser for the misdemeanor charge of crossing illegally. And so the consequence of that policy is that when a parent comes across the border with the child, the parent is immediately criminally charged and the parent and that parent's child are separated. So this has been going on since the summer of 2017. But it was kind of happening in drips and drabs. It was happening kind of irregularly at different, at different points along the US Mexico border. And then it got formalized as a policy last month. And that's when we kind of started to see this profusion of horror stories about families being separated.
- [04:44]
Dorothy Wickenden
So one thing that's confusing is that Trump's policies do seem to be working in deterring people from crossing the border. And Trump has taken credit for that. But at the same time, they want to indicate that there's this terrible problem and they need to crack down, you know, in a very draconian way. So what is the truth?
- [05:05]
Jonathan Blitzer
Well, there was initially, in the immediate months after Trump took office, there was a decline in border crossers. And the way that's generally measured is by how Many people Border Patrol apprehends along the border. So those numbers dropped significantly in the months immediately after the president took office. I do think that that was a kind of Trump effect. People thought, okay, let's see what this guy really does in office. He promised the very worst. We're gonna have to kind of keep our distance and be cautious. But before long, the number ticked back up and migration continued. And so it's really impossible to deter huge amounts of migrants coming from Central America. They're fleeing horrendous conditions, violence, poverty, all sorts of things. And so the president has been enraged over the last several months that the numbers of border crossers have seemed to rise. Now, when you pan out and look at those numbers in context, those numbers are no higher than they were at the end of the Obama administration. But Trump seems to have taken it personally. At the same time, people in his administration, the real hardliners, Jeff Sessions and other Sessions acolytes, have decided to use this moment to try to gin up fear and anxiety about a crisis at the border. And so they're acting as though the border is being overrun, when in fact the numbers are actually at relatively low levels.
- [06:23]
Dorothy Wickenden
And this is where Sessions, Trump has found in Sessions a totally like minded individual, somebody who has spent decades devoting his attention as a senator to this issue.
- [06:35]
Jonathan Blitzer
Yeah, it's funny actually, in some ways it might even be more helpful to think about it in the reverse that Sessions found in Trump. Finally, someone who could actually, you know, Steve Bannon once said to Jeff Sessions, because they were very like minded about questions of immigration. Bannon said to Sessions, you know, Trump can personify some of this stuff for you. This, the problem Sessions always had was he was essentially laughed out of the room as a senator. He was seen as so far right, such an extremist on issues of immigration that he couldn't be taken seriously. And finally in Donald Trump, he found someone who's willing to embrace this message of kind of tough economic populism, linking that popular to an anti immigrant animus. And Sessions has been hatching ideas on this subject for more than a decade. This is how he's actually kind of defined his reputation, both as a lawmaker and now as attorney general.
- [07:21]
Dorothy Wickenden
So what about this immigration handbook he created a couple years ago?
- [07:25]
Jonathan Blitzer
So in January 2015, right after the Republicans retook the Senate, Jeff Sessions, then a senator, drafted a document called the Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority. And at the start of this document, he makes an interesting kind of inference from the 2012 election results. The presidential election results at a time when the establishment Republican position was okay. Mitt Romney was too aggressive in how he excluded many Americans in his message. Sessions took the exact opposite lesson from the 2012 election and said, really, there's no issue on which the common voter and the political elite are farther apart than immigration. And so in the rest of this document, he proceeds to outline a long list of policy preferences, and they're all the policy preferences that you're starting to see enacted now. So he tackles the issue of DACA needing to end what he considered executive amnesty for dreamers. He talked about needing to ramp up enforcement. He talked about needing to close asylum and refugee loopholes, sanctuary cities. Almost every single thing you hear now was something that Jeff Sessions floated earlier. And it's all in this document from 2015.
- [08:33]
Dorothy Wickenden
It's just remarkable. And, you know, I'm struck by. For all the chaos in other areas of White House policy, there just, there seems to be just remarkable discipline on this issue issue. Who are the people inside the White House who are implementing this, and how closely do they work with Sessions?
- [08:50]
Jonathan Blitzer
So Jeff Sessions came in with a number of former staffers who have now been kind of sprinkled in different areas of the federal bureaucracy in the White House. The main person, someone who's now familiar to a lot of us, Stephen Miller, the President's senior policy advisor, someone who's extremely hawkish on issues related to immigration. But there are other people who are less well known who also have major authority over issues like this. One of those people is a man named Gene Hamilton, Someone in his mid-30s, former session staffer, lawyer. At the start of the Trump administration, he worked at the Department of Homeland Security in a senior role, advising John Kelly, shaping policy. The memo that was written that formally kind of offered the justification for ending DACA was actually drafted by this guy, Gene Hamilton, Hamilton Miller. They worked together on the Muslim ban. They've worked together on a number of other policy priorities. Kind of anytime there is a major policy that is hatched within this administration, their fingerprints are all over it. And there are a few other people, too, in different branches of the federal bureaucracy. And actually, here is where it expands out a little bit. There are still some more Sessions people at dhs, at the Department of Homeland Security, but there are also other anti immigration hardliners who came up through the pipeline of Chuck Grassley's office, the Iowa senator. And those people have kind of worked themselves into one of the arms of the Department of Homeland Security called uscis, which is United States Citizenship and immigration services. And so you have kind of a lot of like minded people who have been on the outer conservative fringes on these issues for years who are now coordinating and working pretty systematically to put this agenda into motion.
- [10:29]
Asma Khalid
America is changing and so is the world.
- [10:33]
Tristan Redman
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [10:41]
Asma Khalid
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington D.C. hi.
- [10:43]
Tristan Redman
I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is the Global Story.
- [10:47]
Asma Khalid
Every weekday we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [10:53]
Tristan Redman
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [11:00]
Dorothy Wickenden
So you've got this unity and sort of ideological drive. And yet the way it's being implemented, as we've seen, is a disaster. Maybe explain how it is that women, say, who have been separated from their children and are about to be deported under this policy, then cannot find their children again.
- [11:19]
Jonathan Blitzer
So what the government is saying is, look, when you cross the border illegally, we have no choice but to prosecute you. Now, obviously that's not true, but that's their position. And actually, as you quoted earlier, one way that Jeff Sessions describes parents who are crossing the border with their children is as child smugglers. I mean, these are parents crossing the border with their own kids. But the problem really with this family separation issue is that once you prosecute the parents and you separate the kids from them at the border and they're funneled into two different branches basically of the federal bureaucracy along the border. So the kids go under the care and custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. The parents, after being briefly criminally charged and prosecuted, they are then remanded into the custody of the Department of Homeland Security. There is no coordination between these two sprawling federal departments. And so what's often happening is you have parents who are set to be deported who do not know where their kids are. There isn't coordination such that US Authorities can say, okay, we're gonna hold off on deporting you, at least until we locate your kid, and the very least we can deport you together. The work to coordinate between parents and children is being done pretty much entirely by advocates who are fighting along along the border right now to try to get more information about people in custody.
- [12:33]
Dorothy Wickenden
And are parents being sent back to their home countries without their children?
- [12:37]
Jonathan Blitzer
There have been, there have been documented cases of that. And again, at this stage it's almost impossible to quantify, which in some ways is the Scariest part, there's really no telling how many people this has affected.
- [12:49]
Dorothy Wickenden
Trump opponents often look to judges to prevent civil liberties infractions and discrimination against ethnic groups. We saw that with the ongoing attempts to challenge the administration's travel ban on Muslims. What power does the judicial branch have when it comes to the zero tolerance policy of Sessions?
- [13:06]
Jonathan Blitzer
There are actually limited avenues for challenging the zero tolerance policy. I mean, Jeff Sessions hasn't sort of constitutionally stepped out on any sort of limb in saying that the government has the right to prosecute people who have crossed the border illegally. There are lawsuits pending that are targeted at addressing this issue of family separation. But those lawsuits tend to be localized more to the question of, okay, in immigration detention, if a family is separated, how can we stop this? But in terms of stopping the actual zero tolerance policy, it's unclear what kinds of success advocates and lawyers will have in challenging it.
- [13:45]
Dorothy Wickenden
What has happened to the fear of persecution? Is that still considered a legitimate reason to be allowed to stay in this country?
- [13:54]
Jonathan Blitzer
So earlier this week, Jeff Sessions issued this ruling that dramatically redrew the scope of US Asylum law. He reversed a decision by another immigration body in the US that had found that a woman from El Salvador who had suffered horrific domestic violence, abuse by her husband could get asylum in the US and in Jeff Sessions view, she didn't have legitimate claim to asylum in the US because she wasn't persecuted by a so called state actor, a government that was persecuting her for her political beliefs or for her identity. And what this can mean is that tens of thousands of people who in the past had avenues for seeking asylum in the US because they were persecuted by gangs, which, while not state actors, dominate life in some Central American countries or people, for example, classes of women who are being abused by spouses and who, because of the kind of strictures of their particular society, can't easily escape that sort of abuse. Sessions has taken all of these kinds of claims and basically said they're not enough anymore for asylum.
- [14:58]
Dorothy Wickenden
And does he have the power to reverse a judge's decision entirely within his power?
- [15:04]
Jonathan Blitzer
I mean, these are all traditional authorities that the Attorney General reserves for himself. They're not commonly used. But Jeff Sessions has, of course, dusted off these kind of old prerogatives and is making great use of them.
- [15:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
And the ACLU and other groups are now filing lawsuits. Can you just go through one of those for us and how it might play out in coming months?
- [15:24]
Jonathan Blitzer
There are two ACLU lawsuits that are particularly relevant right now. One concerns the indefinite detention of Asylum seekers. So one thing that the government is doing right now is when someone appears at the border seeking asylum, the government is detaining that person while the courts process that person's asylum claim. Now, there are huge backlogs in the immigration courts, so that means someone can be in detention for a prolonged period of time. So when you think about how this relates to family separation, it's actually quite scary because that means that if a parent comes across the border with a kid and they're immediately separated and, and the parent is now in detention pending a determination by a judge about whether or not an asylum claim is valid, you can have a parent and a child separated for months and months on end without any clarity. And so one of the lawsuits brought by the ACLU is challenging the government's use of indefinite detention to punish asylum seekers and essentially to use that sort of punishment as an attempt to scare away other border crossers. That's one of the major lawsuits that we're seeing. And another concerns the illegality, inhumanity, more specifically, a family separation at the border.
- [16:28]
Dorothy Wickenden
So in the past couple of decades, there have been many failed attempts by congressional Republicans to achieve bipartisan immigration reform. They came pretty close a couple times. But now the midterms are approaching and the few moderates left in Congress are scrambling to distance themselves from some of Sessions policies. What is happening right now in Congress and what are the politics of immigration reform as we're entering this final stretch?
- [16:54]
Jonathan Blitzer
Well, you, you, you've got a few things going on at once. First of all, in the White House, you've got the likes of Stephen Miller trying to exaggerate the sense of crisis at the border and intensify all of these fault lines in the electorate. But in Congress, it's more complicated, as you say, because you've got moderate Republicans who are attempting to distance themselves from the administration. You've got conservative hardliners who are trying to scotch any effort by moderates to kind of strike an independent path on immigration. And so at the moment, we're seeing this play out very specifically with this effort to bring to a vote on the floor of the House a series of bills that address the issue of dreamers and daca. What a group of moderates who are often described as sort of mounting a rebellion, ironically, within the House. What this group of moderates attempted to do was say, okay, there are all of these hard line proposals on the table for how to deal with DACA and dreamers. We have more moderate proposals, but at the very least, what we want is we want a vote on all of the different options that are on the table.
- [17:53]
Dorothy Wickenden
Who's leading that effort?
- [17:54]
Jonathan Blitzer
There are a series of Republicans from states that have left them vulnerable in their reelection efforts. So you've got a Texas Republican named Will Hurd. You've got a California Republican named Jeff Denham. You've got Carlos Curbelo in Florida. You've got guys who are representing districts that have a lot of Hispanic voters that typically move a little bit more in a moderate direction. And these guys are very concerned that as the Trump administration continues to stake out this harder and harder line on immigration and that come midterms, these guys are gonna be vulnerable.
- [18:27]
Dorothy Wickenden
You're about to go down to Texas next week. Tell us what you're gonna be looking for and who you wanna be talking to.
- [18:33]
Jonathan Blitzer
I think the next big phase of reporting and advocacy around this issue of family separation involves figuring out exactly how families are trying to get reunified, how advocates are trying to do it, what measures, if any, the government is taking to try to coordinate between these different departments that are in charge of looking after kids and. And their parents while they're in custody. And so the idea, I think, will be to try to talk systematically to people along the border and see exactly what this process is looking like. How are parents even able to inquire about their kids while they're in detention? How are advocates dealing with children who are in detention who are 2, 3, 4 years old? So it will be trying to bring some clarity to a lot of the actual kind of human suffering that has resulted from this policy.
- [19:20]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thanks so much, John.
- [19:22]
Jonathan Blitzer
Thanks, Dorothy.
- [19:23]
Dorothy Wickenden
Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer and a frequent contributor to newyorker.com this has been the Political Scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. And find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. This podcast is. This is produced by Alex Barron and Hannah Wilentz. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [19:56]
David Remnick
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, the gun God and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [20:26]
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