"Attorney General Jeff Sessions went to the border in Arizona on Tuesday and declared it a hellscape, a ‘ground zero’ of death and violence where Americans must ‘take our stand’ against a tide of evil flooding up from Mexico.
It was familiar Sessions-speak, about drug cartels and ‘transnational gangs’ poisoning and raping and chopping off heads, things he said for years on the Senate floor as the gentleman from Alabama. But with a big difference: Now he controls the machinery of federal law enforcement, and his gonzo-apocalypto vision of immigration suddenly has force and weight behind it, from the officers and prosecutors and judges who answer to him.
When Mr. Sessions got to the part about the ‘criminal aliens and the coyotes and the document forgers’ overthrowing our immigration system, the American flag behind him had clearly heard enough — it leaned back and fell over as if in a stupor. An agent rushed to rescue it, and stood there for the rest of the speech: a human flag stand and metaphor. A guy with a uniform and gun, wrapped in Old Glory, helping to give the Trump administration’s nativist policies a patriotic sheen."
(Via.) .Jeff Sessions, Unleashed at the Border - The New York Times:
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