President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) to serve as attorney general of the United States is misguided and dangerous and should be stopped.
When the nomination of Sessions was announced, African-Americans, Latinos and immigrants knowledgeable about his history shuddered. As did the broader civil rights community, including former Department of Justice lawyers who once worked with him.
Sessions’s record is reason enough to reject his nomination. Simply put, he has worked against justice his entire life.
He has prosecuted civil rights leaders for trying to register black voters and called the Voting Rights Act “intrusive.” He characterized the NAACP and ACLU as “un-American” and “communist-inspired” for “trying to force civil rights down the throats of people.”
His racial animus extends to his own colleagues — as U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Alabama, he repeatedly referred to an African-American assistant U.S. attorney as “boy” and once told him that he should “be careful what you say to white folks.”
All of this evidence came to light over three decades ago, after Sessions was nominated to serve as a federal judge. Ultimately, his nomination was voted down by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
{mosads}Since that time, Sessions’s views have not changed — instead, as a U.S. senator, he has continued to advance an agenda that is anti-immigrant, anti-civil rights and antithetical to our democratic values.
Notably, since 2013, he has given more than a dozen interviews to Breitbart News, an online outlet widely regarded as a white nationalist news organization.
Sessions’s more recent record also shows a deep animosity directed toward immigrants and today, he is known to be arguably the most anti-immigrant senator serving in the Senate.
His views on immigration reflect that he is a man driven by nativist ideology. He has opposed nearly all pieces of legislation that would revise our broken immigration system during his tenure in the Senate. He has called for building a wall since the mid-2000s. He has advocated for the “self-deportation” of immigrants and wants to cancel federal funds to sanctuary cities that allow local law enforcement to create safe communities.
He was an avid supporter of H.B. 56, an anti-immigrant law that passed in his home state of Alabama, which banned landlords from renting homes to undocumented immigrants, forced schools to check students’ legal status and required police to arrest suspected immigration violators (this law was ultimately struck down by a federal court and found to be unconstitutional.)
As recently as December, Sessions spoke for 30 minutes about why he was in favor of barring people from entering the United States because of their religion, although a bipartisan group of his colleagues have disagreed. And he continues to be opposed to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship to those born in the United States, established in 1867 to ensure African-Americans were guaranteed citizenship.
In an effort to avoid all of this from coming to light, Sessions has withheld large pieces of his past in a Senate questionnaire leading up to his confirmation hearing next week.
But the record is clear: Sessions is anti-civil rights. He is unfit to serve as U.S. attorney general.
At a time when our country is being increasingly divided by fear, racism and violence, more than ever we need an attorney general who will unite and lead on law enforcement and justice issues and who has a vision for everyone in America.
Sessions has clearly shown that he is unfit to be our nation’s top law enforcement official and run the agency that is responsible for enforcing our nation’s civil rights laws.
There is lot at stake for this nation, its people, and our destiny. Let us aspire to — and demand an attorney general whose aspirations for this country and its system of justice are filled with courage, reason and a belief in true equality for all.
Wade Henderson is president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Matos is director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.