John Kelly Says USA Has No Room For Illiterate Peasants, Didn't Mean His Own Ancestors

Guy who pushed family separation sure hopes it won't have to be used too much.

Goddamned bigot John Kelly gave an interview to National Public Radio that aired on Friday, and you will be shocked to learn that he is doing his very best to suck up to the goddamned bigot he works for, carefully pointing out that, in contrast to those lying reports of Kelly calling Trump an idiot, Donald Trump is actually "Very smart -- a very, very smart guy. I mean a super smart guy." See? It's on the record, so Trump won't fire him, maybe. But hey, about that goddamned bigoted stuff:

When the conversation with NPR reporter John Burnett turned to immigration, Kelly did his best to portray himself as a decent, "compassionate" kind of guy, and (in an unaired portion of the interview transcript ) Kelly even managed to sound fairly reasonable while discussing the 300,000 Haitians, Salvadorans, and Hondurans who have resided legally in the US since natural disasters hit their countries. He said that those who have been in the US on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for a "considerable period of time" should be given a pathway to citizenship, although of course Congress would have to pass legislation to enact that. The Trump administration, of course, isn't about to do anything for those people, since Homeland Security announced in January -- against the advice of US diplomats -- that Salvadorans and Haitians would have 18 months to get out or be deported (Hondurans' TPS ended last week, starting their own 18-month deadline). So while Kelly thinks it would be nice if Congress would help them, he's not exactly pushing for any mercy on their behalf from the executive branch: Donald Trump could renew TPS with a signature, but suddenly, as with DACA, it's Congress's job to fix the mess Trump created.

As for DACA, Kelly once again put the blame on Congress, as if he hadn't been the one who blew up the bipartisan deal the Senate took to the White House back in January. He just can't believe Democrats aren't willing to sacrifice future legal immigrants forever in order to help DACA recipients:

[This] president wants to get [DACA recipients] out of limbo and get them into heaven. But it is astounding to me with all of my interactions with the Hispanic Caucus, the Democratic Caucus, all of that that when this stuff was served up on a silver platter they did nothing.

Then Burnett got to the administration's exciting new policy of charging all immigrants who cross the border illegally with a federal misdemeanor, which means ICE takes their kids away and puts them in juvenile shelters until their parents are tried -- yes, even for people who are seeking asylum and are found to have a credible fear of persecution. Kelly may have been aiming for something less inflammatory than Trump's "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists" talk, but made it clear we don't need those people in our America anyway:

Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people. They're not criminals. They're not MS-13. Some of them are not. But they're also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They're overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from – fourth, fifth, sixth grade educations are kind of the norm. They don't speak English, obviously that's a big thing. They don't speak English. They don't integrate well, they don't have skills. They're not bad people. They're coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. But a big name of the game is deterrence.

Burnett pushed Kelly on the family separation policy that Kelly had first floated when he was the secretary of DHS:

Burnett: Family separation stands as a pretty tough deterrent.

Kelly: It could be a tough deterrent — would be a tough deterrent. A much faster turnaround on asylum seekers.

Burnett: Even though people say that's cruel and heartless to take a mother away from her children?

Kelly: I wouldn't put it quite that way. The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.

Then, if the government doesn't lose track of the kids, they can be reunited with their criminal parents and shipped back to where they came from, and be killed by gangs.

Look, the USA simply doesn't have room for people who don't speaka the English. People like the second wife of one of John Kelly's own great-grandfathers:

Deep dive tk, but here is the 1910 census showing Kelly's great-grandfather Giuseppe Pedalino and his second wife Concetta. (Kelly's great-grandma died in 1898.)

He was a wagon driver.
She was illiterate and could not speak English 10 years after arrival. #resistancegenealogy   pic.twitter.com/N9AfuLNvb1 

— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 11, 2018 

Or, for that matter, another of his great-grandfathers:

Here's John Kelly's maternal grandmother Teresa as a child in the 1900 census.

Her father, a day laborer named John DeMarco had been here for 18 years.
He had not become a citizen.
He could not read, write, or speak English. #resistancegenealogy   pic.twitter.com/pmnHD4Yobq 

— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 11, 2018 

Get real. That's all ancient history. Surely a bunch of ill-educated people who don't understand the basics of our modern scientific age could never fit in and become REAL Americans? At least the ignorant, barely literate people who are born here have the good sense to vote for Donald Trump.

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[ NPR / NPR / Jennifer Mendelsohn on Twitter]