Chief of Staff John Kelly showed his true colors this morning when he brazenly wandered into racist territory when discussing the looming March 5th deadline for the DREAMERs with Capitol Hill reporters – the 800,000 or so undocumented Americans who were brought to the United States as children and protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
The DACA protections are set to expire next month, which could lead to one of the largest mass deportations in American history if Congress fails to get it act together and pass legislation permanently enshrining their protections and offering them the path to citizenship that they deserve.
Kelly, the so-called “adult in the room,” decided to insult and mock undocumented immigrants who were “too lazy to get off their asses and register” for the program.
John Kelly describing part of Trump immigration plan: pic.twitter.com/AG6dV7JmsN
— Erica Werner (@ericawerner) February 6, 2018
The use of the “lazy immigrant” trope is extremely offensive, especially considering the appalling cruelty that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement police have been showing to undocumented immigrants whose only crime is simply to have been born in the wrong geographic location.
Many of those undocumented workers are terrified of attempting to register for DACA because ICE has been known to set up “safe” meetings and then arrest the migrants as soon as they show up.
Others simply don’t have the $500 needed to register for the program in the first place.
But perhaps it’s not so surprising to hear this kind of casual racism from the man who volunteered to run the United States Department of Racial Profiling – more commonly known as Homeland Security – and used to oversee our nation’s immoral and illegal concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Kelly, once applauded for being the “adult in the room” because the pundit class has a misguided and fetishistic obsession for those in military uniform, has exposed himself as being just as much an ideological extremist as Steven Miller or any of the other far-right ghouls that scrabble their way through the West Wing these days.
