Washington DC – Last week, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel wrote an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press calling out the Donald Trump’s cabinet nomination picks – several of whom have a slew of sexual assault lawsuits and accusations.

AG Nessel recently sat down with MSNBC’s Alex Witt to further elaborate on the negative message Trump’s proposed nominees send to survivors and touched on how Trump’s mass deportation plans could drain resources from local law enforcement and actually make communities less safe.

Key highlights:

• “And when you pick nominee after nominee that has some sort of scandalous behavior in their background, where they’ve been credibly accused of either committing sexual assaults, or aiding and abetting in it in some way, it sends such a negative message to these survivors that if they come forward, they’re not gonna be believed, especially when you have people who are in charge of these enormous bureaucratic agencies like the military whose traditionally had a problem handling sexual assault cases against women who serve.” 
• “…I think it tells law enforcement that these crimes are really not as devastating as we know they are. It also sends a message to judges, to jurors, and to really the public at large that we’re not taking these kinds of cases seriously, and people who commit these offenses really haven’t done anything that bad, and nothing could be further from the truth.” 
• “We have all kinds of partnerships that involve local, state and federal authorities, and specifically we work with homeland security, we work with the FBI, we work with US Marshals. And we’ve sort of already been told by some of those entities that some of our ongoing projects where we work to apprehend serial killers and cold case homicides and human trafficking cases that they don’t know that they’re going to be available to work with us in those kinds of cases in the future because they’re going to be so busy diverting their finite resources to try to apprehend individuals who may be in the country illegally.” 
• “And irrespective of what you your opinion is about ensuring that you’re detaining undocumented people, the concern is a lot of those people, while they might be here illegally and that in and of itself it’s a crime…but when you decide to use your your resources to capture those individuals as opposed to going after murderers and serial rapists and human traffickers, that we’re making our communities a whole lot less safe by doing that.”

Watch the full segment here.

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