Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly is under fire once again, this time for an interview he gave to NPR in which he offered racist reasons for why undocumented immigrants don’t belong in the U.S.
At issue is President Donald Trump’s cruel and unnecessary order to separate undocumented parents and children when they are detained by federal authorities.
After acknowledging that “the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people,” Kelly then offered up his racist views.
Undocumented immigrants are “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society,” he claimed.
“They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills.”
Kelly also defended Trump’s demand families be split apart.
“They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. … The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”
To be clear, the law does not require children to be separated from their parents.
Kelly has made ugly remarks before. In February he said undocumented immigrants were “too lazy to get off their asses” to sign up for DACA. And before joining the Trump administration he said gay people serving openly in the armed forces would be lethal to other soldiers. “Marines will die from this,” he said.
Meanwhile, many on social media are furious.
Image by US Dept. of Homeland Security via Flickr