Attorney General Jeff Sessions accused Democrats and members of the media of grossly mischaracterizing President Donald Trump’s recent moves on immigration. | Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images Sessions upholds Trump’s faltering ‘zero tolerance’ policy 'I'm convinced that the people of this country support these efforts,' the attorney general said.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday called immigration enforcement “a decisive issue for our time,” maintaining a hard line on illegal border crossings a day after a key Department of Homeland Security official declared the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy effectively dead.

“This immigration question is a decisive issue for our time,” Sessions said at the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation’s annual luncheon in Los Angeles. “As the president often says, a country without borders is not a country. I don’t know why that’s so hard for some people to understand.”


He went on to accuse Democrats and members of the media of grossly mischaracterizing President Donald Trump’s recent moves on immigration, remarking that the United States actually has “generous laws” pertaining to migrants entering the country.

“When we enforce any limits, we get attacked by the media, the so-called elites, the special-interest allies, political warriors and open-borders advocates,” Sessions said. “They’re never happy with anything. But I’m convinced that the people of this country support these efforts.”

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The political left was even unsatisfied with the president’s recent about-face on an administration directive to separate families at the U.S.-Mexico border, Sessions asserted.

“We’re going to do that. It’s not easy, but we’re working at it,” he said of the policy reversal. “How did the open-borders crowd respond to this? What did they say? No. They don’t want them to be held. They don’t want them to be deported at all. They want them to be released into the country.”

The commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, announced on Monday that his agency was no longer referring for criminal prosecution families caught crossing the border. Later Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted that the administration’s “zero tolerance” approach to immigration enforcement was still in effect.

"We’re not changing the policy,” she said. “We’re simply out of resources. And at some point, Congress has to do what they were elected to do.”

White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah on Tuesday refused to say whether the White House was still standing behind the president’s zero-tolerance mandate, instead calling on lawmakers in Congress to take up immigration legislation and ease the “administrative constraints” that he said were tying Trump’s hands on enforcement measures.

“The president’s enforcement posture to the Department of Justice obviously has been amended to some extent by the president’s executive order from last week,” Shah acknowledged. “The goal here is to enforce the law to the extent possible without separating families.”

Sessions did take a victory lap on immigration policy on Tuesday in celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling on the administration’s travel ban earlier in the day. The justices, in a 5-4 decision, upheld the president’s order imposing travel restrictions against five majority-Muslim countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen — as well as North Korea and Venezuela.

“I gotta say, we had a good day this morning,” Sessions said. “This decision is critical to ensuring the continuing authority of President Trump and all future presidents to protect the American people. It is the president, after all, who is elected and entrusted with the safety and security of the American people, and to enforce an immigration system that serves the national interest.”

