Sessions presses agenda in Scottsdale
AG highlights get-tough approach to immigration
It was a brief sketch of policy, a pep talk more than anything, and it ended where one would expect.
“We’re sending a message to the world: The border is not open,” U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday morning in Scottsdale.
“This is the Trump era,” Sessions said near the start of his his brief remarks at the spring meeting of the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies.
“We know which side we’re on. The side of law and order.”
There were no surprises, no new spins to the audience made up mostly of state police in a ballroom at the Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch.
The attorney general swung through Arizona on his way to California, where later Monday he held a joint press conference on the U.S.-Mexico border with Thomas Homan, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deputy director.
In Scottsdale, Sessions spoke of thoughts and prayers for John McCain and for a police officer killed in the line of duty in Nogales. He also gave encouragement to FBI Director Christopher Wray and a “new incentive” for that beleaguered agency.
And there was predictable talk about law and order. On opioids: “We’re gonna work on that.” He mentioned more classes in ballistics provided by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. An investment of $100 million in state and local crime labs to clear up forensic bottlenecks in investigations. Grants for testing rape kits.
Sessions tut-tutted over the problems that encrypted phones and other devices cause for law enforcement. You can blow up a safe, he said, and pry open a filing cabinet, “But you get a phone — nobody, not even a judge can access the information.”
Then, not unexpectedly: “We’re also reviewing the rule of law in immigration, and that will reduce crime,” he said.
He rattled off the familiar litany: the wall, first and foremost; the additional 35 prosecutors and 18 immigration judges headed to border states to deal with backlogs, without mentioning the caravan of immigrants that recently marched on a U.S. border entry point near San Diego. Even first-time immigration offenders would be prosecuted, he promised.
Sessions also denounced sanctuary cities as “an affirmation of open borders.”
“We the American people want to see an end to this lawlessness,” he said.