The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sessions blasts sanctuary cities in Philadelphia appearance
Police chief: violence not by ‘people from other countries.’
PHILADELPHIA — The news cycle had not been kind to Attorney General Jeff Sessions by the time he made it to Philadelphia on Friday.
His boss was griping about him in The New York Times. He was fighting off rumors that he’d resign. And then, late Thursday, a federal judge had refused to reinstate the controversial executive order meant to be a cornerstone of his Department of Justice: one aimed at cutting federal funds from sanctuary cities.
Now, Sessions was in one of those cities, addressing a packed room at the U.S. Attorney’s Office that included the head of a police department he had threatened to defund.
For the most part, he stuck to the script. He touched on violent crime and decried gang violence. He lamented skyrocketing overdose deaths. Like President Donald Trump before him, he cited the murder rate here, which is up 21 percent this year, and spoke, at length, about the unsolved killing of Tymier Frasier, a 14-year-old boy shot to death in Kensington in May.
And he said sanctuary cities like Philadelphia were harming their residents by not cooperating with the feds. (The city forbids police officers from asking about the immigration status of people they encounter, and does not honor requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold inmates in custody without a warrant.)
Sessions urged officials here to “re-think” such policies. “Some jurisdictions in this country refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities and turn over illegal aliens who commit crimes — even MS-13 gang members,” he said. He cited two oft-mentioned cases in which undocumented immigrants had been released from custody in Philadelphia, including one man who was later rearrested in connection with the rape of a child.
Still, Sessions said, he wasn’t blaming local police.
“I know that you want to help,” he said. “The problem is the policies that tie your hands.”
Afterward, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross told a gaggle of reporters that he supported Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney’s policies and believed local police should stay out of immigration enforcement.
“We have a tough enough time building relationships as it is,” he said. “As it relates to violent crime, our problems are not people from other countries.”