Are the department of Homeland Security personnel
going to separate the children
from their mom’s and dad's?
We have tremendous experience dealing with unaccompanied minors.
Yes I am considering [separating families] in order to deter
more movement along this terribly dangerous network.
That’s General John F. Kelly.
Trump’s Chief of Staff,
Guantanamo Bay super-fan,
anti-immigration nationalist,
and supposedly the voice of reason in the White House.
John Francis Kelly was born in 1950 in Boston to Irish Catholic immigrants.
Kelly wasted time by stowing himself away in the empty boxcars of trains,
traveling across the country and back again.
In 1970 he enlisted in the Marine Corps.
Two years later he was discharged so he could attend the University of Massachusetts Boston.
He graduated in 1976 as a commissioned officer
and returned to the Marine Corps where he’d serve for 45 years,
where he was decorated with numerous awards and promoted to General.
He served during both Gulf Wars—including Operation Desert Storm and the Iraq war.
He was Head of Southern Command,
a role that had him oversee the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
Kelly had ultimate control over the detainees, many of whom had not been charged with any crime.
When the detainees held a hunger strike to protest the brutality,
Kelly responded with force-feeding and solitary confinement.
Kelly opposed the Obama administration’s failed plans to close down GITMO.
While overseeing what many recognize as one of the greatest symbols of torture and human rights abuses of modern times,
Kelly fought against a move to let women serve in combat roles because it would lead to “lower standards.”
Kelly also thinks this:
And let me be clear about marijuana,
It is a potentially dangerous gateway drug that frequently leads to the use of harder drugs…
His resume, however, was a gateway to something much harder than he had ever done before:
A role in Trump’s White House.
Trump tapped Kelly as Secretary of Homeland Security because, like Trump, Kelly is a hawk on immigration.
Although the agency was set up right after the 9/11 attacks to combat terrorism,
under Trump it’s become an arm of the anti-immigrant machine.
The wall and a physical barrier, something to secure our border.
You all know that we're looking at that-
in fact, I think the proposals closed out yesterday.
What it will look like,
how tall it will be,
how thick it will be,
what color it will be, uh, is yet to be determined.
Kelly might not know what the wall would look like, but he sure knows what the people it would keep out look like.
While Kelly seems intent on protecting his country, he seems to forget what it was built upon.
As Homeland Security chief,
Kelly started a media propaganda campaign to paint undocumented immigrants as criminals,
orderings officials to release stories about the most egregious crimes
committed by immigrants to justify the widespread raids his Department was performing.
Immigration arrests have spiked by 42 percent since Trump took office.
And that attitude got him a promotion:
six months later Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus left—
prompting Trump to promote Kelly to the position,
where he’d join Stephen Miller as two of the most extremist anti-immigration thinkers on Trump’s staff.
We just swore in General Kelly. He will do a spectacular job—I have no doubt.
Trump may have been excited, but Kelly wasn’t exactly ecstatic to start his new role.
The last thing I wanted to do was walk away from one of the great honors of my life-
being the Secretary of Homeland Security.
But I did something wrong and God punished me, I guess.
[Laughter]
Kelly’s past at the Department of Homeland Security, and overseeing a detention facility,
may lead you to believe he’s strong on justice, but he isn’t always…
when it comes to the accused sexual harassers he’s friends with.
Kelly stood as character witness for a fellow Marine accused of sexual harassment
and testified on behalf of a Marine officer who didn’t discipline his men for urinating on human dead bodies.
After the Daily Mail reported allegations of physical and verbal abuse brought on by former top aide,
Rob Porter.
Kelly praised him as "a man of true integrity and honor".
Porter resigned and Kelly stood by him—
even after the photo of his ex wife with a black eye was released.
Kelly, now captain of the Trump ship, at first was slated to bring some much needed discipline,
structure, and order to the West Wing.
KELLY: Use that on the press, sir.
TRUMP: Yeah!
All calls to the President had to be routed through the White House switchboard for his approval.
Kelly attempted to control the flow of information that got to the oval office—
even insisting that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump
have to go through him before visiting with the President.
However, in recent months, Trump has crossed the lines Kelly has laid down,
and the General hasn’t done anything to stop it.
Kelly’s first test of keeping things presidential
was a complete failure when Trump responded to the racist attacks in Charlottesville—
saying there were “fine people” on “many sides,”
Kelly stood there, defeated...
But he stuck around!
While he’s taken steps to try and tame the madness occurring in The White House,
it looks like he’s coming up a bit short.
His boss is starting to feel isolated with these new rules.
But If his past complicity says anything, the door to the oval office will stay wide open.
Kelly’s endeavoring to comprehend the Trump administration and his place in it
is ongoing and could quickly change course.
For instance, recently he’s reportedly called the White House a “miserable place to work.”
Sorry John!
I read it all the time, pretty consistently, but I'm not quitting today, I don’t believe,
and I just talked to the president.
I don't think I'm being fired today.