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Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III seems very confused as of late. During a Senate hearing on Russian interference last month, the alleged perjurer said, "I don't remember" or "I don't recall" nearly 30 times throughout his testimony, leaving some to wonder if America’s most racist Keebler elf has “a memory problem.” Sessions still isn’t helping his case, this week claiming during a speech alongside Adam Laxalt, Nevada’s anti-immigrant attorney general, that sanctuary cities are more violent than cities without such policies by citing a study that actually shows the exact opposite. “A memory problem,” indeed. Or, he’s just a damned liar. The researchers who led the study cited by Sessions were flooded with messages about the speech, and in an op-ed, corrected Sessions:
On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech in Las Vegas on sanctuary cities and local law enforcement. He announced, “According to a recent study from the University of California, Riverside, cities with these policies have more violent crime on average than those that don’t.” Almost certainly, the reference is to our study, which we first published here at the Monkey Cage in The Washington Post last October and later in the academic outlet Urban Affairs Review.
The attorney general’s summation of our study, however, is not true. In fact, our study suggests a different conclusion: Municipalities that chose to designate themselves as sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants experience crime rates no higher than they otherwise would. We state this clearly throughout our study.
Benjamin Gonzalez-O’Brien, one of the study researchers and an assistant professor of political science at Highline College, told the Huffington Post he was “surprised and pretty upset” about Sessions misrepresenting his data during the speech, which apparently several other right-wing outlets have done and most likely how Sessions found out about the study in the first place. “We find no evidence that crime is higher in cities that become sanctuaries,” Gonzalez-O’Brien states in the op-ed he co-authored with Loren Collingwood, a fellow researcher and UC Riverside professor.
As a matter of fact, even ICE’s acting director reluctantly admitted that immigrants are not more likely than native-born Americans to commit more crime, with two decades of research showing “that immigrants commit fewer crimes, on average, than native-born Americans.” In fact, communities with higher levels of immigration have shown “lower rates of crime and violence.” No wonder Donald Trump and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III have to blatantly lie in order to further their anti-immigrant agenda.
Sessions has previously misrepresented the truth while criticizing sanctuary policies. He has repeatedly implied that it is illegal for jurisdictions to decline to hold individuals when Immigration and Customs Enforcement asks them to, which is the basis of many sanctuary policies. That’s not the case ― which the Justice Department has said and which Sessions himself acknowledged in May after a judge put a temporary halt on Trump’s anti-sanctuary city executive order.
Gonzalez-O’Brien said he wants people to have the facts so they can decide where they stand on the issue of sanctuary cities. Their study was peer-reviewed, and their data is publicly available.
“If the administration is so convinced that sanctuary cities breed crime we would encourage them to actually do some research and actually collect some data―which they have access to―and to actually show that this is in fact the case,” Gonzalez-O’Brien said. “The fact that they haven’t done so is probably because they can’t.” Of course, we’ve already seen how Trump responds to government data. When it works in his favor, it’s the hugest ever and all thanks to him. When it works against him, it’s fake news. Much like Sessions’ claim about sanctuary cities this week.