Jeff Sessions jokes about separated families to laughing crowd
Attorney General Jeff Sessions cracked a joke about the administration’s immigration chaos, and was greeted with laughs at the idea of separated families.
Sessions spoke Tuesday to a crowd at the conservative-leaning Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, and accused critics of his “zero tolerance” immigration policy of hypocrisy.
“These same people live in gated communities, many of them, and are featured at events where you have to have an ID to even come in to hear em speak. They like a little security around themselves,” he said.
“If you try to scale the fence they’d be even too happy to have you arrested and separated from your children.”
The last line brought laughs and a few cheers from the audience in Los Angeles, which was greeted with protests by those who see the separation of children from their undocumented parents as inhumane.
After first insisting that Congress deal with the problem, President Trump signed an executive order amid the outrage reversing the policy he put in place in April, allowing children to remain with their parents for 30 days.
The fates of those families that have already been separated have hung in limbo with limited action from the federal government, though on Tuesday a federal judge ordered authorities to reunite the loved ones within 30 days.
That order, in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit in California, also ordered an injunction against future family separations.
Media
Jeff Sessions cracks joke about family separation to laughter and applause at speech in Los Angeles. https://t.co/319jARULTx pic.twitter.com/FT3zwOBIzy
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 27, 2018
Reality
Poll after poll found massive disapproval with the Trump administration’s cruel policy of indefinitely separating children from their families as a deterrent to future immigration. So this is not the “lunatic fringe” but the vast majority of Americans.
Even Sessions’ joke is lie and based on a complete misunderstanding of our justice system.
If you take a Criminal Justice 101 class, you will learn the primary intention of incarcerating people for crimes is because they have harmed our society and as a form of punishment they are forced to rectify that harm. Removing that individual from their family is a side-effect. Have you ever heard the term, “he’s paid his debt to society?” That is what we are talking about.
Trump, separating families, is their primary intent.