Evie Fordham on June 15, 2018
The Washington Post compared Attorney General Jeff Sessions to a slaveholder after he quoted the Bible on Thursday while discussing his department’s policy of prosecuting all illegal immigrants who cross the border.
“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” Sessions said. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent and fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”
He made the statement during a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
WaPo ran a story entitled “Sessions cites Bible passage used to defend slavery in defense of separating immigrant families” on Friday. Rather than detailing the statistics Sessions cited in the speech that explain the immigration policy, the story quoted John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania.
“This is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made,” Fea said.
Sessions spent much of the speech discussing the numbers behind current immigration policy, including separating families at the Southwest border.
“The previous administration wouldn’t prosecute aliens if they came with children,” Sessions said. “It was de-facto open borders if you came with children. The results were unsurprising. More and more illegal aliens started showing up at the border with children.”
Sessions laid out the numbers in the speech.
“In 2013, fewer than 15,000 family units were apprehended crossing our border illegally between ports of entry in dangerous areas of the country,” he said. “Five years later, it was more than 75,000, a five-fold increase in five years. It didn’t even have to be their child that was brought, it could be anyone. You can imagine that this created a lot of danger.”
The U.S. has the “opportunity” to fix its broken immigration system now, Sessions said.
“I believe that’s it’s moral, right, just and decent that we have a lawful system of immigration,” he said. “The American people have been asking for it.”
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