Jeff Sessions

More than 20 illegal immigrants have been charged with document and benefit fraud, officials announced Thursday, after a Boston-based sweep designed to crack down on the means many illegal immigrants use to live and remain in the U.S.

All told, the feds netted 25 people — 21 of them illegal immigrants — in the sweep, including a convicted murderer who escaped from Puerto Rican prison and had been living under a different name in Massachusetts, and a drug trafficker who authorities say stole the identity of a U.S. citizen displaced by last year’s hurricanes in Puerto Rico.

Identity fraud is one of the seamy sides of illegal immigrant, with many of the estimated 11 million unauthorized migrants in the U.S. having stolen or illicitly bought someone else’s identity, then used it to get a job or obtain benefits.

The Obama administration downplayed the effects of identity fraud, issuing guidance saying it wouldn’t be held against illegal immigrants seeking protections such as the DACA deportation amnesty.

Mr. Sessions said they’re changing that mentality.

“Across this city and across America, teachers, truck drivers, and construction workers are going to work and paying taxes that are being stolen from the public treasury by fraudsters and criminals,” he said in announcing the charges against 25 people.

Most of the 25 are Dominicans who stole identities of U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico, an American territory.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is temporarily shutting down a taxpayer-funded advice service for the huge numbers of illegal migrants who drive down blue-collar wages throughout the United States, according to the Washington Post.

The program, dubbed the Legal Orientation Program, paid various left-wing groups to provide immigration-court advice to migrants, according to the Washington Post. The program helped roughly 53,000 migrants during 2017, the Post said.

The shutdown spotlights the administration’s efforts to reform the nation’s business-oriented immigration system, which annually delivers at least one million additional cheap workers and taxpayer-aided consumers to businesses, and up to one million government-dependent voters to the Democratic Party. Overall, the nation’s migration policy shifts at least $500 billion per year from young Americans up to investors, employers, real-estate owners, and migration-industry progressives.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, his office announced in a Thursday release. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA)—another immigration hardliner who’s stood with Sessions every step of the way over the past several years—will serve as that subcommittee’s deputy chairman.

Sessions will also chair the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee. This announcement comes after Sessions, who was in line to chair the full Senate Budget Committee, stepped aside to allow Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) to chair it. Enzi asserted seniority, even though Sessions has been ranking member for the last four years. Sessions and Enzi were elected to the U.S. Senate on the same day, but Enzi technically due to the luck of the draw.

“I am honored to have the opportunity to chair these two crucial subcommittees,” Sessions said in his statement, before detailing what he will do with each subcommittee.

As chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, Sessions said his focus “will be to advance the core interests of the nation and its people” over the interests of lobbyists, special interests and illegal aliens.

“On no issue have special interests had a tighter grip than on the issue of immigration,” Sessions said, noting his first action as chairman will be renaming the subcommittee to a much more fitting name.

That is why I am renaming the subcommittee “Immigration and the National Interest,” as a declaration to the American people that this subcommittee belongs to them. Senator Vitter, a strong voice for the national interest, will be serving as Republican Deputy Chairman. The financial and political elite have been controlling this debate for years; this subcommittee will give voice to those whose voice has been shut out: the voice of the dedicated immigration officers who have been blocked from doing their jobs; the voice of the working families whose wages have been reduced by years of record immigration; the voice of the American IT workers who are being replaced with guest workers; the voice of the parents who are worried about their schools and hospitals; and the voice of all Americans who believe we must have a lawful system of immigration they can be proud of and that puts their interests first.