Jeff Session Illegal Immigration Stance on This Week - Dreamers can be Deported - Video
PUBLISHED:  Apr 23, 2017
DESCRIPTION:
Striking a different tone than President Trump on DREAMers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said they like “everyone that enters the country unlawfully” are “subject to being deported.”

The Trump administration has let stand former President Obama's order protecting so-called DREAMers, unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, from deportation. And President Trump said Friday that young people protected under this policy “should rest easy.”

Jeff Sessions, in an exclusive interview Sunday April 23, 2017 on “This Week,” told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos, “There’s no doubt the president has sympathy for young people who were brought here at early ages.”

He also said the Department of Homeland Security's “first and strongest priority -- no doubt about it" is to arrest unauthorized immigrants who have committed crimes. "They’re focusing primarily on that,” he said.

“We don't have the ability to round up everybody and there's no plans to do that,” Sessions said. “But we're going to focus first, as the president has directed us, on the criminal element and we've got to get that under control.”

Pressed by Stephanopoulos on whether DREAMers can “rest easy” as the president said, Sessions said, “Well, we’ll see. I believe that everyone who enters the country illegally is subject to being deported.

Helping to pay for the border wall will come from mostly Mexicans who will be deprived of illegal federal tax credits, saving the federal government billions of dollars.

Los Angeles was singled out as a sanctuary city defying the federal government in helping to deport illegal aliens.

Los Angeles Times article: U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions on Sunday disputed criticism from California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra that a federal immigration crackdown is “reckless,” and accused state officials of jeopardizing public safety with so-called sanctuary city policies that restrict cooperation with federal agents.

Taking their disagreement to the national stage, Sessions and Becerra appeared live but in separate interviews on the ABC-TV news show “This Week,” hosted by George Stephanopoulos.

Becerra said on Friday that threats to withhold federal funds from states and cities that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities are reckless and undermine public safety.

“It's nothing reckless,” Sessions said when asked about Becerra’s comments. “It's nothing extreme about saying if someone comes through our country unlawfully and commits a crime, another crime in the country, that they should be deported. That's what the law says.”

State and local governments are not allowed by federal law to prohibit their law enforcement officers from sharing information with the federal government, Sessions said.

“In other words, if a person commits a crime in Los Angeles or in the case of Kate Steinle, San Francisco, and an individual there is released multiple times and he comes back to San Francisco because it's a sanctuary city and commits a murder, that's the kind of situation that that person should have been deported previously and not allowed to return,” Sessions said.

Becerra said Sunday that California is ready to fight any attempt to withhold federal funds.

"Whoever wants to come at us, that's hostility, we'll be ready," Becerra said. "We're going to continue to abide by federal law and the U.S. Constitution. And we're hoping the federal government will also abide by the U.S. Constitution, which gives my state the right to decide how to do public safety.”

The state attorney general was skeptical about comments by President Trump in recent days that so-called Dreamers —young immigrants brought to this country illegally by a parent — will not be targeted for immigration enforcement.

“It's not clear what we can trust, what statement we can believe in, and that causes a great deal of not just anxiety, but confusion — not just for those immigrant families, but for our law enforcement personnel,” Becerra said.

He also denounced the Trump proposal to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border as a “medieval solution” to immigration issues, adding that neither U.S. taxpayers nor Mexico want to pay for the proposal.
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