President-elect Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security believes that Central Americans are seeking asylum on the southern border in part because they are “very confident” that if they arrive they’ll be allowed to remain in the country.
“Most of the people that are coming up here from certainly Central America are coming here for two reasons, three probably,” retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, who led U.S. Southern Command before retiring in 2016, said during his Senate Homeland Security Confirmation hearing on Tuesday. “The first is it is very unsafe; they’re some of the most dangerous countries on the planet and that’s unfortunate.”
That violence leads to “a lack of economic development” that leaves people impoverished, he said. “And finally, they’re very confident that if they pay the money, get on the network, they will get to the United States and they will be in their view at least unlikely that they’ll be going back to Honduras, Guatemala and other countries like that,” he said.
Kelly was more pointed in his criticism of the Obama administration in his written testimony “My understanding is that under current policies, virtually all illegal aliens get a pass until they commit, and are convicted of, a violent crime,” he wrote. “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.”
In the written questionnaire, Kelly said he doesn’t “have a plan at this time” for how to go about enforcing those laws, he also wrote that he has “given no thought to the topic of a deportation force” to enforce those laws. More broadly, however, Kelly told lawmakers that “defense of the southwest border really starts about 1,500 miles south,” by partnering with South American countries to crack down on drug cartels. “We could have better partnership, I think we can work closer with them, we could give them more of what they need,” he said during the hearing.
Kelly also said that Trump’s long-promised border wall wouldn’t be effective by itself.
“A physical barrier in and of itself, certainly as a military person that understands defense and defenses, a physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job,” he said. “It has to be really a layered defense. If you were to build a wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, you’d still have to back that wall up with patrolling by human beings, by sensors, by observation devices.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a co-author of the Gang of Eight immigration bill that emphasized technological surveillance rather than a physical wall as a border security means, prodded him to concede that it’s “technology that would help us secure the border as much as anything else.”
Kelly concurred. “Technology would be a big part of it,” he said. “The aerostats, observation devices mounted in certain terrain features UAVs for sure, sensors in places, perhaps, that the wall can’t be built or won’t be built anytime soon, in terms of the [construction] of that project, yes sir.”
