Jeff Sessions, who resigned on Wednesday, ranked as one of the most regressive political figures to ever lead the Justice Department. The ousted attorney general spent the last two years reshaping federal law enforcement into a blunter and more punitive instrument, squeezing legal and undocumented immigrants alike, and tilting the scales of justice away from disadvantaged communities.

His departure came as no surprise. President Donald Trump spent the last year and a half publicly railing against the former Alabama senator for his perceived disloyalty in the Russia investigation. Trump announced in September that he would not oust Sessions until after the midterm elections. His resignation, which Sessions pointedly noted was at Trump’s request in his letter, came less than 24 hours after the polls closed.

In a post on Twitter, Trump said that he was naming Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’s chief of staff, as acting attorney general until he names a permanent replacement. Whittaker is expected to be a loyal foot soldier in the interim period. In August 2017, he wrote an op-ed for CNN warning that special counsel Robert Mueller would be “going too far” if he investigated Trump’s personal finances.

We are pleased to announce that Matthew G. Whitaker, Chief of Staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice, will become our new Acting Attorney General of the United States. He will serve our Country well.... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2018

Sessions’s departure marks an ignominious end for one of the president’s most effective Cabinet members. Not since A. Mitchell Palmer was the nation’s attorney general so singularly focused on imposing his own ideological vision on the rest of the nation. In the U.S. Senate, Sessions’s strident restrictionist views on immigration had been relegated to the ideological fringes. But as attorney general, he enjoyed unparalleled influence over the machinery of American immigration and wielded it against those hoping to build a better life for themselves in the United States.



His greatest policy triumph amounted to systemic child abuse. Sessions first announced the Trump administration’s campaign to separate migrant families at the border in May. He framed it as an effort to crack down on child trafficking, though the policy’s true purpose was to spread fear among migrants and inflict cruelty upon them. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” he declared. Thousands of children were ultimately separated from their parents, and hundreds have yet to be reunited.