Border wall won’t fix problem, Kelly says
Trump Homeland Security pick favors foreign aid, more patrols, fence
WASHINGTON — For more than a year, Donald Trump rallied supporters by vowing to build a “big, beautiful” wall along the nearly 2,000-mile-long U.S. border with Mexico, calling it crucial to stop migrants, drugs and criminals from entering the country.
John Kelly, the president-elect’s choice to head the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for guarding the nation’s borders, said Tuesday that a wall won’t solve the problem.
Kelly, a retired four-star general, told his Senate confirmation hearing that cutting the flow of migrants and illegal drugs would require addressing rising violence and lack of opportunity in poverty-stricken countries in Latin America, not just building a wall.
“A physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job,” Kelly told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “It has to be really a layered defense.”
Kelly endorsed using diplomacy and targeted foreign aid, not just arrests and deportations, to boost border security.
He called for increasing counter-narcotics aid, investment and other assistance to Central America and as far south as Peru and Colombia, as well as for creating a “drug demand reduction campaign” in the United States.
He said most migrants from the region who enter the U.S. are looking for jobs and to escape drug-fueled gang violence back home.
In written answers to committee questions, Kelly said he had “only briefly discussed the wall with” Trump and had “no discussions” with him about who would pay for it.
Rather than building a single long wall, he suggested one that would “funnel the flow in certain directions and into specific culs-de-sac” as part of a layered defense that would include more patrols, aerial drones, ground sensors and other devices.
No lawmaker on the panel voiced opposition to Kelly.
If confirmed, he would be the fifth head of a massive department that was cobbled together from 22 agencies after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
It now has an annual budget of $41 billion and 240,000 employees responsible for border security, immigration control, cyber-security, screening air passengers and other tasks.
The sharpest questioning came from Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who was elected in November, over the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
DACA, as the program begun by President Barack Obama is known, defers deportations for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who arrived in the U.S. without authorization as children, grew up here and committed no crimes.
Harris pressed Kelly about whether he would use the DACA information to target people. She asked him to honor the Obama administration’s promise not to use DACA applications to assist in deportations.
Kelly said convicted criminals and other categories of immigrants might be a higher priority for removal, though he acknowledged he had not had discussions with Trump’s advisers about immigration.
“There’s a big spectrum of people who need to be dealt with in term of deportation,” he said.
Kelly also seemed to raise questions about Trump’s vow to use “extreme vetting” of refugees and immigrants to prevent militants from entering the country.
“You can’t guarantee 100 percent, and if you are taking in large numbers of people from places where you really can’t vet them very well you do the best you can,” Kelly said.
Kelly has worked as a top aide to two defense secretaries, and as a Marine Corps liaison to Congress. He served as head of U.S. Southern Command before he retired.