Since the creation of the Civil Rights Division in 1957, the Department of Justice has been a strong ally to the civil rights community, helping ensure that voting rights, employment rights, and anti-discrimination protections are enjoyed by everyone. Unfortunately, the civil rights work of the Department of Justice will be at stake as the U.S. Senate considers U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to serve as the U.S. Attorney General, the top enforcer of many of the Trump administration’s policies. Sessions’ hostility toward immigration issues, voting rights issues, and civil rights protections could possibly gut many of the critical protections that vulnerable communities depend on to exercise our constitutional rights.
Long before Trump began referring to immigrants as criminals and erroneously decrying their theft of jobs from American workers, Sessions was using the same flawed rhetoric to justify his obstruction of comprehensive immigration reform. Over the course of his 20 years in the Senate, he has opposed every piece of immigration legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship for the millions of immigrants that are already here and has routinely called for building a wall along the southern border. In addition to his opposition to undocumented immigration, Sessions has called for a limit on legal immigration, claiming that low-wage immigrants are the culprits of declining wages for middle class Americans. Handing over the reins of the Justice Department to an immigration hardliner tasked with enforcing President Trump’s immigration policies would be devastating to the millions of Latinos living in mixed-status families.
In addition to his xenophobic views, Sessions has also demonstrated that he is no friend to voting rights. As a U.S. Attorney in the 1980s, Sessions aggressively prosecuted black voting rights advocates in Alabama for electoral fraud, despite a lack of evidence. In his confirmation hearings for a federal judgeship in 1986, Sessions referred to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as “intrusive” and after the Supreme Court gutted section 5 of the VRA in the Shelby County v. Holder decision, Sessions called it “good news for the South.” Sessions has made false claims of widespread voter fraud to justify draconian voter ID laws that have negatively impacted the ability of many minorities to vote. At a time when many state legislatures across the country are pushing laws that effectively suppress the vote of millions of mostly minority voters, it is imperative that the Department of Justice take a stand and challenge these laws that merely serve as a smokescreen to disenfranchise minority voters. With an Attorney General who doesn’t believe in the significance of the Voting Rights Act, a Department of Justice led by Sessions would be detrimental to voting rights.
In the wake of the Shelby decision and the anticipated anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration, it is now more important than ever to ensure that the Department of Justice continues to ensure that every American’s constitutional rights are protected. Sessions’ record on civil rights issues shows that nothing has changed since his 1986 confirmation hearing when he was denied a federal judgeship because of allegations of racism. Confirming Sessions would be a stain on the decades of progress that we have made in the fight for equality, and the Senate must stand up for the rights of the American people and not confirm Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General.