President Trump’s Homeland Security secretary argued Tuesday that a federal judge made an “academic” decision to toss out Trump’s executive order on immigration, even though doing so could harm national security.
Secretary John Kelly told a House panel that while he has “nothing but respect for judges,” their decisions can be “very academic, very almost in a vacuum discussion.”
“And of course, in their courtrooms, they’re protected by people like me,” he said. “So they can have those discussions and if something happens bad from letting people in, they don’t come to the judge to ask him about his ruling, they come to people like me.”
Kelly avoided any echo of Trump’s attack on the “so-called judge,” but he expressed clear frustration at various “misrepresentations” of the order in the earliest days of its implementation. And he defended the order as a necessary step in improving what he called the “minimal” vetting process currently in place.
“The ban … was based on countries that we don’t have any real confidence in right now that they can help us vet people coming to the United States, countries that are in, clearly, disarray,” Kelly said. “We have pretty good confidence [thousands of fighters in Syria] have the kind of papers that could get them passed into western Europe and certainly, by extension, into the United States. So the threat is real, and this pause — that’s what it is, is a pause — will give [the administration] an opportunity to step back and decide what additional vetting we might add to what we already have — which is minimal, in my view.”
Refugees go through a rigorous interview process before receiving a visa to the United States, but some members of the national security community worry the effectiveness of that questioning is limited by a lack of biographical information from the host countries.
Judge James Robart, a George W. Bush appointee in the western district of Washington, issued halted implementation of the order until the lawsuit can get a full hearing. But he exposed himself to criticism by saying that no one from the seven countries affected by the order — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen — has been arrested on terrorism-related charges since the Sept.11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“You’re here arguing on behalf of someone that says we have to protect the United States from these individuals coming from these countries and there’s no support for that,” Robart told the Justice Department attorney.
Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa., a Trump ally and longtime immigration hawk, teed up Kelly’s commentary on the judiciary by citing that statement. “I have here a study by a professor from the University of North Carolina which finds that of all the arrests made for terror-0related activities in the United States since 9/11, almost a quarter of them have direct family ties to those seven countries,” he said.
Kelly avoided a direct knock on the judge in his reply. “Hope is not a course of action for people like me, and police officers, and sheriffs, and members of CBP, people like that,” he said. “I have nothing but respect for our judges, but they live in a different world than I do. I’m paid to worst-case it. He’s paid to, in a very academic environment, make a call. And I don’t criticize him for that, that’s his job, but I’m the one that is charged with protecting the nation, the homeland, and I intend to do that and never hope that some people coming from some part of the world are coming here for the right reasons.”
