President-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, John Kelly, received a warm welcome from Senate Democrats during his confirmation hearing Tuesday.
“We’re extraordinarily grateful and you must be extraordinarily proud, both his daughter and his wife, this is a remarkable public servant,” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., said to the Kelly family during the hearing. “Perhaps this is a love-fest that we’re having with you today.”
It was a surprisingly appropriate summary of the hearing, compared to what Senate Democrats might have expected of Trump’s DHS nominee on election night. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her allies argued that Trump had “hateful” immigration policies, saying that the deportation of illegal immigrants would entail “ripping apart families.”
But Kelly, who will be one of the lead officials tasked with implementing Trump’s immigration policies, seems likely to cruise to confirmation. The retired Marine Corps general was introduced at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing by a bipartisan trio of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary under President George W. Bush and President Obama.
“Gen. John Kelly is an exceptionally well-qualified nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security,” Carper said in his introductory remarks. “John Kelly is a leader. He is humble, not haughty. He has the heart of a servant. He understands that his job has been and will be to serve, not be served. He leads by example … he has the courage to stay out of step when everyone else is marching to the wrong tune.”
Kelly demonstrated a willingness to break with at least some of Trump’s campaign positions, assuring Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., that he opposes “generalized” surveillance of mosques and Muslims in the United States. “I don’t think it’s ever appropriate to focus on something like religion as the only factor,” he said.
However, he didn’t abandon Trump’s promise to increase the deportation of illegal immigrants, although he did avoid saying how he would go about that and how the administration would return the 11 million people unlawfully in the country to their original countries. Instead, he criticized the Obama administration for failing to implement deportation laws.
“My understanding is that under current policies, virtually all illegal aliens get a pass until they commit, and are convicted of, a violent crime,” Kelly wrote in his answers to written questions from the committee. “The Congress has passed longstanding laws making foreign nationals without legal status removable from the United States, and it is proper for DHS, like any other law enforcement organization, to faithfully execute the laws on the books.”
While discussing metrics for evaluating the Department of Homeland Security’s success in securing the border, he aligned with immigration hawks who fault the Obama administration for failing to deport people who evade border security and successfully enter the United States.
“How many you’re actually grabbing at the border would be one metric,” Kelly said. “Internally, how many people are apprehended and enter the process of deportation or at least the legal process [is the second]. And then the price of drugs. I think those would be pretty good metrics [for border security].”
