Editorial Board
Jeff Sessions’s Border Plan Is Cruel and Unnecessary
You don’t have to tear families apart to curb illegal immigration.
Keep them together.
Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images
Defending the border by pulling children from the arms of their parents is brutal, immoral and un-American. That will be the upshot of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s plan to immediately detain and prosecute everyone — including asylum-seekers and parents with children — caught trying to cross illegally into the U.S.
Illegal immigration is wrong, and the government is right to seek to curb it. But this proposal, both cruel and unnecessary, is not the way.