Let’s get something straight: No one, absolutely no one who went to work for Donald Trump should emerge from this administration of professional kidnappers, grifters, liars, assaulters, convicted criminals, and know-nothings without the disgraced-for-life reputation they deserve. That includes former Department of Homeland Security secretary and White House chief of staff John Kelly, who, to recall just a few moments from his disgraceful tenure, oversaw the unshackling of mass-deportation agents, ordered a smear campaign to demonize immigrants, and waged the first battles of the administration’s war on asylum-seekers.
Kelly isn’t sorry for what he did, but he also knows what he did won’t be remembered kindly by history, which is why he’s now in the opening stages of a rehabilitation tour, recently claiming to a Duke University audience that the administration’s family-separation policy “came as a surprise” to him. That’s a lie. He was on television in March 2017 openly considering ripping children from the arms of parents at the southern border, saying, “Yes, I am considering in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network.” Those kids, he said in May of the next year, “will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.” Or whatever.
The fact that he wasn’t laughed out of the room during his speech shows that some will be perfectly willing to believe that he’s taken a sudden 180 on the racist policies he helped mastermind. He’s certainly getting some help from Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who sure loves her White House access. “John Kelly, Out of White House, Breaks With Trump Policies,” reads the headline of her report on Kelly’s speech, stating that on family separation, he “appeared to place most of the blame on the former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who announced the policy.” There was no fact-check to Kelly’s previous remarks on family separation from Haberman, who notoriously claimed in 2016, as stated by the headline of another of her articles, that “Trump’s More Accepting Views on Gay Issues Set Him Apart in G.O.P.” Wonder what Mike Pence thinks about that one.
Months after a federal judge’s reunification deadline, children stolen from families at the border remain in U.S. custody. Kelly’s successor at DHS, Kirstjen Nielsen, was unrepentant at a House oversight hearing on the administration’s anti-immigrant policies this week, expressing no remorse over the recent deaths of two migrant children in U.S. custody, angrily denying that separated children were held in cages (they were), and, again, denying the existence of a family separation policy. “You have no feeling, no compassion, no empathy here,” Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-CA) told her. When the nightmare of this administration is over, there’s no doubt Nielsen will try what Kelly is doing right now. She shouldn’t get away with it, and neither should he.