[Attorney General Jeff Sessions], in an exclusive interview Sunday on “This Week,” told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos, “There’s no doubt the president has sympathy for young people who were brought here at early ages.”He also said the Department of Homeland Security’s “first and strongest priority — no doubt about it” is to arrest unauthorized immigrants who have committed crimes. “They’re focusing primarily on that,” he said.
“Primarily” seemed to be doing a lot of work in that sentence.Asked specifically about the fate of “Dreamers,” the far-right attorney general, “Well, we’ll see. I believe that everyone who enters the country illegally is subject to being deported.”Oh. Literally two days after the president said these young people can “rest easy,” Jeff Sessions, the man Trump and Senate Republicans made the nation’s chief law-enforcement official, told these same young people not to rest easy — because as far as the attorney general is concerned, they’re “subject to being deported.”This is, of course, part of the problem with having a president who doesn’t appear to have any meaningful understanding of current events: no one knows whether to take his words seriously, literally, or symbolically. In this case, who’s right about current U.S. policy, Trump or Sessions? The fact that no one has any idea isn’t a good sign.Postscript: Just to add an additional layer of confusion, four days after the Department of Homeland Security deported Juan Manuel Montes, Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told CNN yesterday, “My organization has not targeted these so-called Dreamers, DACA, and we have many, many more important criminals to go after and get rid of, and not the DACAs.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."