Trumps taps retired Marine general John Kelly for DHS

John Kelly, a retired Marine General and 45-year military veteran, will head the Department of Homeland Security under President-elect Trump, CBS News reported on Wednesday.

In Kelly, Trump would have another four-star military officer for his administration.

He’d probably be responsible for building Trump’s wall.

Kelly has not supported Trump’s hardline stance on Muslims, however, saying US troops “respect and even fight for the right of your neighbor to venerate any God he or she damn well pleases”. He is the most senior military officer to lose a child in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.

As head of U.S. Southern Command, Kelly sought to expand military and humanitarian contacts in Latin America. One might argue that Kelly’s military sensibility might knock some discipline and rigor into this ramshackle department, and maybe it will-but the department might be too ramshackle, too resistant to rigor, for it to matter. As a general, he served concurrently as the Commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command and as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation.

During the 2010 speech, Kelly emphasized the commitments that US service members make to protect and defend the United States and the American people.

Kelly differed with Barack Obama on key issues and has warned of vulnerabilities along the United States’ southern border with Mexico.

Kelly’s long military career began when he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1970.

Blunt-spoken and popular with military personnel, Kelly, 66, was born and raised in Boston. And my concern as the SOUTHCOM commander is even just a few of these, you know, nuts can cause an terrible lot of trouble down in the Caribbean because they don’t have an Federal Bureau of Investigation. “It is not in our power to end it but simply to fight it until our murderous enemy who hates us with visceral disgust for everything we stand for either gives up or we kill them”. “But I’ll take a general with knowledge of the Americas over a radical like Kobach”. But he moves to a civilian agency – a giant one, in fact. DHS is the third-largest Cabinet department, almost a quarter of a million employees. You’ve got immigration, Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, the Secret Service, and national cybersecurity, among others. So it’s this huge diversity of missions. “Hell, these are Marines”, Kelly said. “I believe this is a mistake”, Kelly told the panel. He has stepped back from casting climate change as a hoax, signalled he might be willing to allow the United States to continue participating in the Paris climate change deal aimed at lowering world carbon emissions, and met with former Vice President Al Gore, a leading environmental voice. He was our briefer on the march to Baghdad.

Gen. Kelly’s views on immigration and tightening the border were likely to have appealed to Trump.

BURNETT: Well, he’s definitely a hardliner. When Obama pushed to transfer as many detainees as possible from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which fell under Kelly’s command, he put on the brakes. “There’s been a securitization of migration that is out of whack with reality”, said Sharry.