Attorney General Jeff Sessions is pushing federal prosecutors to bypass immigration courts as part of the Trump administration’s  hard-line strategy on deportation. Behind closed doors, prosecutors are pressing noncitizens to sign away their rights to make a case for  remaining in the country.

A directive to immigration officials across the country to try to portray undocumented immigrants swept up in mass raids as criminals  came directly from then-Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, The Intercept has learned. The redacted emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by students at Vanderbilt University Law School, show that while hundreds of undocumented immigrants were rounded up across the country, DHS officials tried — and largely failed — to engineer a narrative that would substantiate the administration’s claims that the raids were motivated by public safety concerns.

As hundreds of undocumented immigrants were rounded up across the country last February in the first mass raids of the Trump  administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials went out  of their way to portray the people they detained as hardened criminals, instructing field offices to highlight the worst cases for the media and attempting to distract attention from the dozens of individuals who were apprehended despite having no criminal background at all.

President Trump fired his acting attorney general on Monday after she defiantly refused to defend his immigration executive order, accusing the Democratic holdover of trying to obstruct his agenda for political reasons. The acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, on Monday ordered government lawyers not to defend President Trump’s executive order on immigration in court. The president appointed Dana J. Boente, United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, to serve as acting attorney general until Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama is confirmed.