Yesterday, the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation held its annual meeting in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. We were honored to have U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions as our guest speaker. His remarks are available on the USDoJ web site.
I gave my report to the board on CJLF's work since the previous meeting, as I always do. Then Mr. Sessions gave us his remarks, choosing to focus on the immigration controversies.
There has been quite a kerfuffle over one passage in Mr. Sessions' speech. First, a few notes of context.
As I have noted a number of times on this blog, the soft-on-crime effort is, to a large extent, an elitist drive. See, e.g., this post. It's a lot easier to be blasé about crime and wring your hands for the perpetrator when you live in a safe neighborhood and the perps whose release you demand will be victimizing someone else. That is not, of course, to say that everyone on the other side of the debate is a "limousine liberal," just that a lot of them are, and they are the source of most of the money going into this effort.
Second, every time anyone mentions illegal immigration and crime together, there is a massive straw man attack similar to the flock of winged monkeys attacking the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. Irrelevant statistics about crime rates are trumpeted as if they prove some point contrary to what the speaker is saying, even though they do not. As the Attorney General noted later in his remarks, "every one of those crimes [committed by someone who should not be here] is preventable." A comparison to the number of crimes committed by people entitled to be here is irrelevant. For the "sanctuary city" controversy, particularly, the overall crime rates have nothing to do with it. Illegal aliens being released from prison or jail after conviction of a crime obviously are far more likely than the general population (whether legal immigrant, illegal immigrant, or native) to commit further crimes, and cities that aid and abet them in escaping lawful deportation are little better than accomplices in those crimes.
Third, any time the government incarcerates anyone, that person is necessarily separated from his or her family, unless of course the whole family is detained together. Every prosecutor, judge, or jury who has argued for or decided that any person with a family should be imprisoned has decided to separate that person's family from him. In other contexts, there is little controversy about that.
Finally, when Mr. Sessions talked about the "lunatic fringe," he was talking about people who want no borders at all, so that anyone and everyone who wants to waltz across the border may do so. He cited the vice-chairman of Democratic National Committee wearing a T-shirt that endorsed exactly that.
With all that in mind, here is the kerfuffle-generating passage:
The rhetoric we hear from the other side on this issue--as on so many others--has become radicalized. We hear views on television today that are on the lunatic fringe. And what is perhaps more galling is the hypocrisy. These same people live in gated communities and are featured at events where you have to have an ID even to hear them speak.
And if you try to scale their fence, believe me, they'll be only too happy to have you arrested and separated from your family.
They want borders in their lives but not yours and not the American people's. This is why the American people are sick of the lip service and the hypocrisy. They are sick of the politicians who abandon their promises as soon as the mainstream media criticizes them. They've seen it for decades. And now they are supporting a President who is on their side.
Is this a big deal? I didn't think so at the time. I still don't think so. It is entirely true that much of the support for the other side on crime and crime-related issues comes from very well-heeled people who have their own safety fully protected while they degrade the safety of law-abiding but less affluent people who must depend on the government for protection. That was the point, and it is an entirely valid one.
The reaction we see in some of the press and social media bears little resemblance to what actually happened and its actual meaning. The New York Daily News, for example, reported that this comment was "greeted with laughs at the idea of separated families." That is preposterous. The laughs were very clearly directed at Mr. Sessions' dig at the limousine liberals, a point the audience understood even if the Daily News and others did not.
This is not to say that the treatment of persons crossing the border illegally who have committed no crime other than that misdemeanor is not a matter of concern. Of course it is. That complex problem, like all complex problems, has no one solution. We need stronger security at the border, better accommodation of families to avoid separation where possible, and quicker disposition of cases so that detention time is shortened. Most of all, we need strong verification of legal status at the employer level so as to turn off the current to the electromagnet attracting illegal crossings in the first place.
Nothing in the Attorney General's remarks is inconsistent with that, and the dust-up is yet another symptom of the disease rotting the discussion of public issues in this country.
