When it comes to immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has not been reluctant to assert the powers of his office. With his decision, announced Monday, to virtually eliminate domestic violence as grounds for asylum, he summarily swept away more than two decades of hard-fought legal cases and painstaking decisions by immigration judges and appeals courts that favored women who were victims.
In a speech to immigration judges just before his decision was published, Sessions framed it as part of his drive to thwart migrants from Central America coming to the southwest border and to reduce drastically a backlog of more than 700,000 cases that is sinking the nation’s immigration courts. Many of them are asylum cases, with the number of people seeking that protection soaring from fewer than 4,000 in 2009 to more than 73,000 new cases in 2016.
The attorney general steered resolutely against the tide of the #MeToo movement, in which American women have come forward to reveal sexual violence and abuse as hidden systemic realities in many areas of life.
[For more on this story by JULIA PRESTON, go to https://www.themarshallproject...tic-violence-private]
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