Sessions seeks to expand role of DOJ in immigration enforcement
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is seeking to play a more muscular role in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement strategy, a move that is alarming immigrant rights advocates who fear that Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ hard-line ideology could give Justice too much clout in determining policy.
To highlight the department’s expanding role, Sessions is considering making his first trip to the southern border in mid-April to Nogales, Ariz. Aides emphasized that Sessions’s itinerary still is being developed and that the stop in Nogales is still tentative.
In recent weeks, Sessions has taken steps to increase his department’s focus on immigration. He signed on to a letter released Friday with Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly backing the practice of arresting undocumented immigrants at courthouses, saying officials had to resort to such measures when states wouldn’t cooperate on immigration enforcement.
On Thursday, Sessions announced he is expanding a program to deport undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes after they serve their prison sentences, with the hope that the Justice Department can move more people straight from prison to their home countries rather than first moving them to immigrant detention facilities.
Justice said it would expand to 20 the number of prisons participating in the Institutional Hearing Program, which has immigration judges come directly to prisons or has the inmates participate in deportation hearings via video.
“We owe it to the American people to ensure that illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes and are serving time in our federal prisons are expeditiously removed from our country as the law requires,” Sessions said in a statement.
Last month, Sessions used the release of a Federal Justice Statistics report on arrests and prosecution to highlight cases involving immigration offenses, and he also issued a statement in support of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report that listed cities that fail to comply with enforcement orders.
Last week, Sessions appeared in the White House briefing room to issue a threat to those cities that his agency could withhold federal law enforcement grants if they do not start to cooperate.
Sessions’ activism has alarmed immigrant rights advocates concerned the department will play too powerful a role in a policy area that is typically the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security.
“I think we want clarity over who’s running immigration policy,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said in an interview Thursday in Washington. Garcetti signed a directive prohibiting all city employees from using public resources to aide federal civil immigration actions.
“DOJ can give some opinions, but it’s not primarily in their jurisdiction,” Garcetti said. “So I know Senator Sessions has been very engaged, interested and involved in this area, but is he empowered by this administration beyond his formal responsibilities?”
Legal experts said Sessions could significantly restructure the Justice Department by ramping up the number of immigration judges sent to the border to speed up hearings and by pursuing more criminal prosecutions against immigrants in the United States beyond those associated with drug cartels and human smugglers that past administrations have focused on.
The Sessions Justice Department also could: move to strip some protections from undocumented immigrants, such as how much time they have to find a lawyer; more robustly defend Homeland Security enforcement policies that are challenged in court; and use the Office of the Special Counsel to aggressively prevent employers from discriminating against American workers by hiring undocumented workers, said Leon Fresco, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama administration.
“I think they will be incredibly active,” said Fresco, who helped draft the 2013 immigration bill while serving as an aide to Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. The only thing that could slow Sessions, Fresco added, was “finding enough individuals with expertise to speed these issues along.”