Hastening them along was the attorney general, Jeff Sessions. On April 11, 2017, he called for increased criminal prosecutions at the southern border, ordering US attorneys to develop “district-specific guidelines” for bringing charges against first-time border crossers. Federal rules prohibiting the prolonged detention of immigrant children, he said, were nothing more than “loopholes” used by families to game the system at the border. “After their release, many of these people simply disappeared,” he later said. “President Trump is going to fix that.”
