Outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly said today that the Trump administration has moved on from the push for a concrete wall along the southern border.
“To be honest, it’s not a wall,” Kelly told the Los Angeles Times.
Kelly, who will leave the administration in the coming days after a contentious tenure, said Customs and Border Protection agents told him during his brief stint as Homeland Security secretary that they need physical barriers in some areas, but largely indicated a desire for new technology and additional personnel.
“The president still says ‘wall’ — oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats,” Kelly added. “But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it.”
Kelly, Trump’s second Chief of Staff who will leave his post Wednesday, said that Trump abandoned the notion of “a solid concrete wall early on in the administration.”
It marked the starkest admission yet by the president’s inner circle that his signature campaign pledge, which sparked fervent chants of “build that wall” during Trump’s rallies and is now at the center of a budgetary standoff, would not be fulfilled as advertised.
Kelly expressed empathy for illegal immigrants and declined to call their arrival an “invasion.”
He said he is aware of the violence and corruption of some Central American governments from which many of the immigrants flee.
Trump’s desire for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border has led to an ongoing government shutdown that has lasted more than a week.
Trump has demanded $5 billion in funding for the structure, something Democrats have rejected.
Republicans lose control of the House on Wednesday.
Democrats have remained committed to blocking the president’s priority, and with neither side engaging in substantive negotiation, the effect of the partial shutdown was set to spread and to extend into the new year.
Kelly also said the controversial “zero tolerance” immigration policy that led border officials to separate children from their parents was the brainchild of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“What happened was Jeff Sessions, he was the one that instituted the zero-tolerance process on the border that resulted in both people being detained and the family separation,” Kelly said. “He surprised us.”