On the question of immigration, there’s no question a Sessions Justice Department would be a very different place from the Holder/Lynch years. One of the specific crimes Donald Trump mentioned repeatedly on the campaign stump was the case of Kate Steinle, the young woman murdered in San Francisco in 2015 by a criminal illegal immigrant, convicted of multiple felonies and deported multiple times, who was protected from another deportation by local officials enforcing San Francisco’s “sanctuary city” status.
Trump promised to put an end to cities defying federal immigration law. To do the job, he picked Sessions, who has called sanctuary cities “one of the biggest, most egregious, and most dangerous wrongs now occurring in our immigration system today.”
“Sanctuary cities are together freeing an average of 1,000 criminal aliens a month,” Sessions said in October 2015. “Countless crimes are happening as a result of these never-ending releases: DUIs, assaults, burglaries, drug crimes, gang crimes, and murders.”
Now, some sanctuary cities are gearing up for a fight to protect their ability to defy federal law. Sessions, who as a senator voted for (unsuccessful) measures to crack down on sanctuary cities, last year called on the Obama administration to “immediately take action to withhold significant federal law enforcement funding” for sanctuary cities.
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