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.