Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., accused White House chief of staff John Kelly of lying about his desire to protect children brought into the country illegally from deportation.
“General Kelly is a hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear,” Gutierrez said Tuesday.
Gutierrez based that denunciation on Kelly’s past support for DACA, a program that former President Barack Obama established to confer the benefits of legal migration on people who were brought to the country as children. President Trump announced Tuesday that he would phase out the program, which most Republicans regard as an unconstitutional, but he urged lawmakers to provide a legislative fix.
“I have a great heart for these folks we’re talking about, a great love for them, and people think in terms of children but they’re really young adults,” Trump said Tuesday. “I have a love for these people and hopefully now Congress will be able to help them and do it properly.”
That’s consistent with the views that Kelly outlined during a private meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in July. He endorsed the goals program, but echoed the idea that Obama’s procedure for establishing it was unconstitutional. “He’s personally for it,” Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said after the meeting, per the Los Angeles Times. “He thinks it will not hold up [in court], according to the attorneys he’s spoken with.”
Gutierrez, speaking after that meeting, added that Kelly had taken credit for the program’s survival through the first several months of the administration. “Here’s what he did say to us: ‘I’ve been fighting for DACA, and basically the reason we’re in July and nothing has gone awry with DACA is because of my presence as secretary of Homeland Security,'” he said at the time.
The Illinois Democrat summarized Kelly’s comments differently on Tuesday. “General Kelly, when he was the head of Homeland Security, lied straight to the faces of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus about preventing the mass deportation of DREAMers,” Gutierrez said. “He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House along with the white supremacists and those enabling the President’s actions by ‘just following orders.'”
Kelly is a retired four-star general and a Gold Star father, as one of his sons was killed while fighting in Afghanistan. It’s the second time in just over a year that a prominent politician has criticized the father of a fallen U.S. military service member, as President Trump famously derided the Gold Star parents who spoke against him at the Democratic National Convention during the campaign.
Gutierrez defended the DNC-aligned parents, however. “I am offering to give the president my copy of the Constitution, autographed by Khizr Khan, the father of a U.S. army captain killed in Iraq in 2004, who asked a question I do not think any one of us knows the answer to: has the President even read the Constitution?” he said in February.
