David Ortiz Name-Dropped at Jeff Sessions’s Senate Confirmation Hearing

Trump's pick for AG was grilled about his remarks about Dominicans.

Sessions photo by Gage Skidmore on Flickr/Creative Commons; Ortiz photo via AP

Sessions photo by Gage Skidmore on Flickr/Creative Commons; Ortiz photo via AP

The Senate confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks are underway, starting with Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the president-elect’s choice for attorney general.

Sessions, whom former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject in a letter last week, has been criticized for  His anti-immigration stances have also stepped into the spotlight, particularly his remarks about immigrants from the Dominican Republic:

Fundamentally, almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming because they have a skill that would benefit us and that would indicate their likely success in our society. They come in because some other family member of a qualified person is here as a citizen or even a green card holder. That is how they get to come. They are creating a false document to show these are relatives or their spouses and they are married when it is not so.

Per several reports, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, used newly retired Red Sox slugger David Ortiz as an example disproving Sessions’s remarks.

Ortiz had been critical of Trump prior to the November 8 election, calling his inflammatory rhetoric “a slap in the face.”

“Latin people here in the United States are the spark plug of the country’s economy. Whoever opposes that is going to lose,” Ortiz said in a Spanish-language interview with USA Today. “And not just Latin people but immigrants. I’m talking about people who come from Africa, from Asia, other places. All those people come here with one goal, to realize the American dream, and you have to include them in our group.”