New DNC Chair Tom Perez to racist Attorney General Jeff Sessions: “Go shove it, sir”

| 11:12 am EST February 28, 2017
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Newly elected DNC Chair is wasting no time in aggressively going after the Donald Trump administration as promised. Today he called out Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has a long history of taking racist political positions, in direct fashion. Perez’s message to Sessions: “Go shove it, sir.” In those exact words.

Tom Perez made the remarks while he was addressing the Latino Political Summit today. Jeff Sessions had made a statement in 2006 in which he said that “Fundamentally, almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming here because they have a provable skill that would benefit us and that would indicate their likely success in our society.” Those remarks are now directly relevant to Sessions’ new job as Attorney General, in which he’s nominally in charge of protecting the civil rights of all Americans.

And so today Tom Perez summarized Jeff Sessions’ racist remarks about Dominicans, before pointing to the Dominicans in the audience at the Latino Summit as evidence to the contrary, and adding “Go shove it, sir.”

Tom Perez himself is the son of Dominican immigrants. But he’s tackling a larger problem in which the Donald Trump administration has been using ICE agents to round up undocumented Hispanic immigrants across the nation, often against the will of local elected officials and law enforcement. While Perez’s job as DNC Chair is to get Democrats elected to office in upcoming races in 2017 and 2018, most of those races are still on the horizon. For now Perez is seeking to remind American voters that the Trump administration has an openly racist disdain for Hispanic Americans.

New DNC Deputy Chair Keith Ellison also addressed the Latino Summit crowd, promoting what he described as “building political power for Latinos to stand up and fight back.” Since the DNC Election over the weekend, Perez and Ellison have been working together closely in their new leadership roles. You can watch their full remarks to the Latino Political Summit here.