Attorney General Jeff Sessions paraded into Sacramento Wednesday brandishing the administration’s latest lawsuit against California, aptly embodying President Trump’s war on immigrants. Both Sessions’ appearance and Trump’s broader anti-immigrant agenda are crude plays to the country’s divisions and prejudices, designed to distract us from the rapidly accumulating evidence of the president’s unfitness to govern.

Sessions cynically compared the federal attack on California’s sanctuary laws, which limit official and private cooperation with the administration’s effort to purge the state of undocumented immigrants, to the federal struggle with the South over slavery and segregation, saying, “There is no nullification. There is no secession.” The difference, of course, is that the former Alabama senator and the president are using the power of the federal government to promote rather than end official racism.

The attorney general’s speech to a law enforcement gathering continued the administration’s relentless effort to erase distinctions between immigrants and criminals. The state laws at issue recognize the difference by prohibiting police and employers from participating in a federal dragnet that claims to target those with criminal records but too often comes down to racial profiling.

The administration’s first attempt to force its will on recalcitrant jurisdictions, by revoking federal funding, has so far been a deserved failure. As U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco noted this week, “The federal government offers no evidence that there is any link between increases in crime and violence” and its ability to coerce cooperation with immigrant roundups.

Sessions’ visit came as the White House hemorrhaged senior staff, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation threatened Trump’s inner circle, and the attorney general himself verged on replacing immigrants as the president’s favorite punching bag. Trump recently called Sessions “disgraceful” for not prosecuting supposed surveillance abuses in the previous administration, another favorite distraction.

Sessions did succeed in provoking an equal and opposite reaction from California Democrats, for whom taking up the other side of the immigration fight also has obvious political appeal. The desired result was thereby achieved: to inflame partisan, cultural and racial divides at the expense of the vulnerable.

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