Will former Department of Homeland Security Secretary and new White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly’s supposed discipline bring order to chaos? If you look at the final ICE operation under Kelly the answer is a flat-out “no,” with the numbers showing that 70 percent of the immigrants arrested in this supposed “targeted” operation weren’t even targets. In fact, under Kelly’s DHS, guidelines that Barack Obama had set up in order to prioritize the arrests of people who actually did pose a threat to public safety went out the window. Sure, he’s a career military official and maybe the White House really is hoping that Kelly can do something to calm things down (The Mooch is gone, after all). But under his DHS leadership, it was an undisciplined anti-immigrant free-for-all:
Under Obama, DHS leadership took pains to distinguish between unauthorized immigrants who should be prioritized for deportation — “felons” with criminal records or recent entrants — and members of “families” who’d lived in the US peacefully for years. While collateral arrests during immigration operations were known to happen under Obama, ICE agents were generally under instructions to arrest people identified in advance — and only those people.
Many ICE agents hated this. They felt they were being prevented from doing their jobs; on a daily basis, they interacted with people who were deportable under federal law, and weren’t able to try to deport them. As much as anything, collateral arrests symbolized the “handcuffs” that agents felt shackled in under Obama — and which Trump immediately set about taking off once he arrived in January, with the enthusiastic support of then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.
Lind: “Kelly’s management success as head of DHS—the signal policy success of Trump’s administration—is simply that he allowed immigration agents to do what they wanted: arresting whichever unauthorized immigrants they happened to find … Kelly is being promoted, in other words, for the kind of things that ICE did last week—or at least for running a department where agents felt free to arrest hundreds of immigrants as collateral.”
Just today, Axios was reporting that Kelly’s leadership is supposedly already having notable effects, with Trump allegedly rattling off stats during meetings (gold star on the forehead for you, Mr. President). But anyone who has ever tried to herd a cat knows that cats cannot be herded, and the work that Kelly has to show from under Donald Trump’s watch has been nothing short of devastating for immigrant communities, regardless of legal status, across the nation.
John Kelly won’t help solve any problems because he is a part of the problem.