(CNN) Just hours after Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized Chicago and its leaders for "lawless" sanctuary city policies, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired back, saying the administration is "playing politics" to promote its law enforcement policies.

"They use cities as a way of describing violence, as a characterization which they never use around the violence associated with opiates and the drugs that are in suburban and rural communities," Emanuel, a Democrat, told David Axelrod on the "The Axe Files," a podcast from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN. "They're using the immigrant community, particularly, as a way to create something that's not of us that we have to be frightened for."

"I'm guessing, but I think there's a racial component to it," Emanuel also said of Trump's propensity to associate metropolises like Chicago with high rates of violent crime and towering death tolls. Emanuel, however, has been criticized for his city's violent crime. In 2016, there were 762 murders in Chicago, the city's deadliest year in nearly two decades

The city of Chicago has filed suit against the Department of Justice over specific "immigration compliance requirements" in exchange for federal grant money. Emanuel expressed confidence that Chicago's standards as a "welcoming city" would win out.

"Our suit does protect the principle of community policing and protects our values as a welcoming city," he told Axelrod. "And they are on the wrong side of the law, the wrong side of the values, and the wrong on the side of criminal justice as it relates to community policing as a principle."

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