Trump’s John Kelly just called DREAMers “lazy.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid’s response is spot on

White House chief of staff John Kelly put his foot in his mouth and choked on it while making a statement about Trump’s proposal on immigration this morning. Joy Reid’s response is spot on.

Kelly told the Washington Post what he really thinks of Dreamers by way of explaining what the President is willing to do for them in exchange for the money to build his wall. He said that the president’s proposal would extend to cover not only 690,000 currently protected by DACA, but also those who are eligible but haven’t registered. The White House estimates that bumps the number up to 1.8 million.

“The difference between 690 [thousand] and 1.8 million were the people that some would say were too afraid to sign up, others would say were too lazy to get off their asses, but they didn’t sign up,” Kelly told The Washington Post. “So the president, shockingly, said OK, 1.8 million, and then probably the biggest shock was in a path to citizenship. That’s beyond what anyone could have imagined.”

That was the gaffe heard round the world (today) and MSNBC’s Joy Reid clapped back effortlessly.

She summarized the issue perfectly.

Kelly is so tone deaf with his statement, he fails to see that he is actually part of the problem he purports to try to solve. More than half of those 1.8 million people may have feared all along that by registering for protection under DACA, they’d be handing over to the government the personal information it would need to one day round them up and deport them.

That’s not lazy, that’s well founded fear. John Kelly’s doing nothing to resolve it with his heartless statement, and only serves to undercut any accidental goodwill the White House might have built with the Dreamers through this policy proposal.