AG Sessions visits Austin, discusses immigration priorities

AUSTIN, Texas — While protesters gathered Friday morning outside the U.S. Attorney's office at 8th and Congress in Downtown Austin, upstairs U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions took aim at immigration in front of the audience of local, state, and federal law enforcement leaders.

"It says don't come unlawfully. File for lawful entrance and wait your turn," Sessions said of the Trump administration's immigration policies. Last month, Sessions announced an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

"DACA encouraged potentially tens of thousands of vulnerable children to make a trip to the north," Sessions said in Austin Friday.

From 2012 through 2014, a crisis of gang violence and poverty brought a record number of unaccompanied children from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Sessions, however, said they came for DACA status. "The president wants to stop the incentives for vulnerable children to come here illegally," he said.

Sessions also called for an end to sanctuary cities, saying it puts law enforcement at risk. "The president is also confronting the state and local jurisdictions that have undertaken to undo our immigration laws through so called sanctuary policies," he said. Sessions also commended the Texas Legislature for passing Senate Bill 4, the anti-sanctuary cities bill that is currently tied up in court.

Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez, who has defended sanctuary cities as making communities safer, was in the audience. She later released a statement saying, "In his press conference today, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a point that SB4 makes our communities safer. I could not disagree more strongly. SB4 does not make our communities safer and Attorney General Sessions does not know our community. However, at least I was invited to the table, along with my colleagues to discuss the issue. That's more than I ever received from the state of Texas."

But Sessions made it clear that sanctuary cities will pay. "Rather than reconsider their policies many sanctuary jurisdictions feign outrage when they lose federal funds," he said.

Sessions did not take questions from reporters.