Former Trump chief of staff tells Fresno audience he argued against separating families
Before he served 18 months as President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly spent the first six months of Trump’s presidency as Secretary of Homeland Security.
In that role, he oversaw immigration enforcement along the U.S./Mexico border. And Kelly told an audience in Fresno on Wednesday that during his two years in the Trump administration, he had disagreements with the president over orders that resulted in the controversial separation of children from their parents who had been arrested for attempting to enter the country illegally.
During a question-and-answer session following his talk at the San Joaquin Valley Town Hall lecture series, Kelly addressed a query from an audience member about whether the policy was “good for America” – a point Kelly had earlier emphasized should be at the heart of every decision undertaken by the White House.
“All of the activities that are being done at the southwest border are being done because the United States Congress passed laws and said, ‘This is the reality of immigration,’” Kelly said. “When I was at Homeland Security and I would be asked that question by senators and congressmen, I’d say, ‘Look, change the law. I’m with you. I think some of these things need to be updated. So get off your fannies and change the law.”
Kelly said immigration laws require that children who are apprehended at the border and not accompanied by their parents be put into “humanitarian shelters.”
“They have to be taken care of in certain ways, by law, and then the U.S. government has to find a suitable home for them to live in,” whether with family already in the U.S. or in a form of foster homes. The care includes medical care, clothing, schooling and evaluation of homes where they will eventually be placed, Kelly said.
For parents who make their way across the border illegally with their minor children, the process differs. “If they’re not arrested, they’re processed with the kids, and they can’t be held for more than 20 days in these shelters,” Kelly said, “and then they’re released into America and typically disappear forever.”
After months, the attorney general declared that the government would begin arresting the immigrant parents. “By law, the children can’t go to jail with the parents, obviously, so the children had to go into these shelters, etc.,” he said. “It was a controversial thing to do, it only lasted a short period of time, but it was really a decision made by the president and transmitted to the attorney general to arrest, and that then caused this process to really explode out of control”
“Believe me, there were many of us who argued against this, who pointed out the difficulty of doing this,” he added. “It was a decision that was not made by a wide range of people in the White House, and I think we recovered from it as fast as we could.”
Changing the laws
In an interview earlier this week, Kelly told The Bee that “there used to be” people within President Trump’s inner circle in the White House who could offer frank and honest advice to dissuade the president from policy and political missteps without being branded as disloyal.
Kelly was Trump’s chief of staff from mid-2017 through the end of 2018, and said he was often a thorn in the side of some of the president’s political team. “I remember being in the White House very early on and there was discussion about something, and I said, ‘Look, I’m not the smartest guy in the world on this issue, but is this good for America?’” he told the Saroyan Theatre audience. “And they all looked at me – don’t get me wrong, they’re not bad people – and said, ‘We hadn’t thought of that. But it’s good for the midterm or it’s good for the 2020 election.’”
“I drove them crazy because when they were briefing or talking about something, they’d always be looking at me out of the corner of their eye knowing I was going to ask that question,” Kelly added. “And more and more, they’d come in and address it up front. ‘This is good for America, and it’s also good for those other reasons.’”
While Kelly didn’t agree with Trump on separating families, he chastised Congress for not moving to solve immigration concerns.
“In my view, the first thing to do, if you have a Congress that is unwilling to act, is to get at this drug demand problem,” he said, noting that drug sales in America fuel profits that drug cartels in Mexico and other Latin American countries use to buy influence and commit many other crimes.
“The second thing for us to do is to look at those countries not as bad people, because the people coming up here are not bad, overwhelmingly not bad people,” he said. “They’re good people. I disagree with the president every time he’s said anything different about these people.”
Many of the people wanting to enter the U.S. “are coming here for economic opportunity,” he added. “The best thing we can do is find ways to keep them at home by giving them economic opportunities in Guatemala, in Honduras, in El Salvador. … They’d just as soon stay in their home countries where their families are, where their parents are buried, where they go to church, but there’s no opportunity.”
“The solution is in our hands, and it starts with the drug demand and then it goes into investment,” he said. “And frankly, the United States Congress needs to get off its fanny and change the laws.”
This story was originally published January 15, 2020 at 4:12 PM.
