WH Chief: Trump not building a ‘wall’

Outgoing White House chief John Kelly said in an interview published yesterday that he had “nothing but compassion” for undocumented migrants crossing into the US, and undercut President Donald Trump’s claims to be building a “wall” at the Mexico border. As a partial government shutdown entered a ninth day due to an impasse over Trump’s demands for funding the US-Mexico border barrier, the president’s chief of staff told the Los Angeles Times: “To be honest, it’s not a wall.”

“The president still says ‘wall.’ Oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats,” Kelly said. “But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it,” he added. Building a solid “wall” along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) US-Mexico frontier was a central plank of Trump’s 2016 election campaign, and he has tweeted about it almost 100 times this year alone.

“Either we build (finish) the Wall or we close the Border,” Trump -- who has adopted the 2020 re-election mantra “promises made, promises kept” -- posted as recently as Friday. A former Marine general who led the military command responsible for Latin America, Kelly was Trump’s Homeland Security secretary before becoming White House chief of staff in July last year. His relationship with the president reportedly deteriorated, however, and he is to be replaced at the end of the year by Mick Mulvaney, the current budget director.

“Illegal immigrants, overwhelmingly, are not bad people,” Kelly told the LA Times, adding that many had been manipulated by traffickers. “I have nothing but compassion for them, the young kids.” The remarks were in sharp contrast to the rhetoric of the president who regularly appeals to his overwhelmingly white political base by taking a hard line on immigration.