DHS John Kelly: ‘Not Targeting DACA’ For Repatriation

The Department of Homeland Security is not trying to repatriate ‘DACA’ recipients, homeland security secretary John Kelly told a House committee.

“We are not, not, not, targeting DACA registrants right now,” Kelly emphasized June 7, after noting that roughly than 765,000 illegal aliens received renewable work permits from former President Barack Obama’s June 2012 ‘Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals’ quasi-amnesty. 

DHS has repatriated people who violated by their DACA status by committing a crime, and it has also deported people who claimed incorrectly to have filed for DACA status, Kelly said. “When [lawbreakers] came into our hands, they’re not DACA and they go into [repatriation] proceedings,” he said.

Legislators who complain about DACA should write their own law about the DACA illegals, Kelly told one legislator:

With all due respect — not you — but I get beat up a lot by a lot of members on Congress about why we’re going after DACA. We’re not, but my [response] back to them is ‘If you feel so strongly about it, you clearly do, why don’t you do something about it? Why don’t you work with your colleagues, both sides of the aisle, because there is a lot of support for this and change the law and I’ll follow the law.’

Kelly also laid out his enforcement priorities:

I’m looking very, very hard at the 11 million individuals in the United States illegally … We are going after people — individuals, not sweeps, not checkpoints, not roadblocks, not raiding meatpacking plants — we’re going after individual individuals that are: A., here illegally and B., have other violations …  [also] we are trying to go after some of the worst.

Kelly’s statement underlined President Donald Trump’s about-face on his repeated promises to terminate Obama’s amnesty on “day one” of his presidency.

 Obama awarded the DACA permits to younger illegals in the run-up to the 2012 election.