Former U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III refused to be interviewed for a Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general report from this past January that pointed to him as a “driving force” behind the previous administration’s family separation policy, which resulted in the state-sanctioned kidnapping of thousands of children at the southern border.
Flash forward a couple weeks, and America’s most racist Keebler elf is now talking. Not to the inspector general, of course, but to Reuters, where he claimed it “was unfortunate, very unfortunate” that children couldn’t be quickly reunited with their parents. "It turned out to be more of a problem than I think any of us imagined it would be," he said. But report after report has established the fact that former administration officials like Sessions knew exactly what they were doing.
Like detailed in the DOJ inspector general’s report, U.S. attorneys expressed concern about separations, “including the whereabouts of children separated as a result of the policy.” But Sessions paid them no heed, instructing them during a conference call to carry on. “We need to take away children,” he said. “Sessions told the Southwest border U.S. Attorneys that prosecution of family unit adults would be swift and would be followed by immediate reunification of the separated family,” the report also said. But as we very well know, hundreds of children are still separated today.
But we don’t even have to look to a lengthy government watchdog report to know that Sessions knew the effects of the policy—all you had to do was turn on your television. During an appearance on right-wing host Laura Ingraham’s show at the height of media attention on the policy, Sessions openly said that he hoped the intentional cruelty scared away other asylum-seeking families.
“General Sessions, is this policy in part used as a deterrent?” Ingraham asked her fellow anti-immigrant racist. “Are you trying to deter people from bringing children or minors across this dangerous journey? Is that part of what the separation is about?” Sessions tried to go on about law and order, which we all know was so important to the previous administration, eyeroll, but eventually admitted it: “So, yes, hopefully people will get the message and come through the border at the port of entry and not break across the border unlawfully.” Asylum, by the way, is legal immigration.
Officials all over the previous administration knew but ignored the warnings about traumatic injury to children and their families. Beginning in the middle of 2017, staffers with the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) began to notice an alarming increase in the number of separated children who were being transferred to the agency from officials at the southern border. This was abnormal—typically, the Health and Human Services (HHS) agency sees unaccompanied minors, or children who come to the U.S. without parents.
Worried about the traumatic effects of family separation and the lack of immediate bed space for these children, ORR staffers took their concerns to superiors. But those concerns went ignored, the HHS inspector general said in a March 2020 report. “OIG found no evidence that these three senior HHS officials took action to protect children’s interests in response to the information and concerns raised by ORR staff,” the report said, noting that superiors instead scolded staffers for putting concerns in writing. Other staffers found out about the family separation policy not from the administration, but from the news.
Sessions is a mouthy little twerp—remember him being absolutely giddy to go in front of cameras to announce the end of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—yet he refused to be interviewed by the DOJ inspector general.
“The OIG contacted former Attorney General Jeff Sessions numerous times throughout this review to seek an interview, but he did not agree to an interview,” the report said. Now a former employee, he could not be forced to submit to any questioning. “The OIG does not have the authority to compel the testimony of individuals who are no longer DOJ employees.” Inspector General Michael Horowitz has since “pleaded with Congress” for the authority to force testimony from former officials like Sessions, NBC News reported.
The need for accountability doesn’t go away just because the previous administration is out of power, and it can’t go away because children kidnapped from their families are still separated years after the previous administration quietly “piloted” the policy in El Paso, Texas. Soboroff said that since last month, advocates have located the parents of an additional 112 children. The parents of 499 have not yet been reached, most of them because they were quickly deported by the previous administration.
The Biden administration this week announced that it would allow separated families to reunite in the U.S. if they wished, and in addition would partner with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector to help families with transportation and mental healthcare services as well as legal services, with expenses whenever possible “borne by government, NGOs, and the private sector—and never by the families.” The reunification task force also officially announced respected advocate Michelle Brané as its executive director.
“We are dedicating our resources throughout the Department of Homeland Security and the federal government, and bringing our full weight to bear, to reunite children who were cruelly separated from their parents,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. “It is our moral imperative to not only reunite the families, but to provide them with the relief, resources, and services they need to heal.”
But Sessions, meanwhile, wants us all to believe he believes it was all “unfortunate, very unfortunate.” I’m sure he’s very, very sorry—very, very sorry he couldn’t rip apart more families. But what’s to be expected from a man who once used the Bible to justify his humanitarian crimes?