Jeff Sessions: DOJ Not Like The Nazis Because They Were Trying To Keep ‘Jews From Leaving’
Just jaw-dropping. The US attorney general makes only this one ahistorical distinction between his own policy and the Nazi government’s. Among other things, we know there were Jewish refugees from the Third Reich because the United States turned them away. https://t.co/7it4k8FyaU https://t.co/ldFbASJvro
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 19, 2018
Attorney General Jeff Sessions rejected claims that the Justice Department’s new zero-tolerance immigration policy echoed Nazi Germany because concentration camps “were trying to keep Jews from leaving.”
Sessions spoke with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday and defended his agency amid a growing outcry over family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border under the new DOJ policy.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said nearly 2,000 children had been separated from their parents over a six-week period ending in May. Many of these children are being held in juvenile detention centers.
Sessions said comparisons of those centers to the Nazis camps wasn’t fair because the Justice Department was simply trying to deter people from crossing the border, not keep them in the U.S.
“Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country,” Sessions said. “We need to think it through, be rational and thoughtful about it. We want to allow asylum for people who qualify for it, but people who want economic migration for their personal financial benefit, and what they think is their families’ benefit, is not a basis for a claim of asylum.”