Outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly says the Trump administration isn’t going to build a wall.
“To be honest, it’s not a wall,” Kelly told the Los Angeles Times in an interview.
Kelly is leaving the West Wing during a partial government shutdown, which began due to an impasse over border wall funding in Congress. President Trump has demanded $5 billion, while Democrats won’t concede more than $1.3 billion for border security.
Regardless the result of that fight, Kelly dismissed the idea that the final product will live up to the president’s campaign promise of building a “big, beautiful wall.”
“The president still says ‘wall’ — oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats. But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it,” Kelly said.
[Opinion: On the border wall, Trump has to show, not tell if he wants to win]
While Trump still does describe the barrier generally as “the wall,” he explained earlier this month that the idea for a concrete wall has been replaced by “artistically designed steel slats.”
“The Democrats, are saying loud and clear that they do not want to build a Concrete Wall – but we are not building a Concrete Wall, we are building artistically designed steel slats, so that you can easily see through it. It will be beautiful and, at the same time, give our Country the security that our citizens deserve,” Trump posted to Twitter on Dec. 18. “It will go up fast and save us BILLIONS of dollars a month once completed!”
Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, was Trump’s homeland security secretary before he joined the White House.
He told the Times that when he joined DHS in early 2017, he consulted border security officials, calling them “salt-of-the-earth, Joe-Six-Pack folks,” on what they needed. He said their response was, “‘Well we need a physical barrier in certain places, we need technology across the board, and we need more people.'”
Kelly also broke from Trump’s harsh rhetoric concerning Central American migrants who have attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. In the run-up to the November midterm elections in particular, Trump and his allies warned of migrant “caravans” that were full of criminals.
“Illegal immigrants, overwhelmingly, are not bad people,” Kelly said. “I have nothing but compassion for them, the young kids.”
Kelly did acknowledge that the U.S. does have an “immigration problem” when asked whether Trump stirs concerns about a migrant “invasion” for political reasons.
Kelly will leave his White House post at the end of year. He will be replaced by Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
