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Kelly, asked on
Sunday morning talk shows to clarify the department's position
on the status of these illegal immigrants protected under an
Obama-era program, said the agency is focused on deporting only
dangerous criminals.
“My organization has not targeted these so-called Dreamers,"
Kelly told CNN, referring to the name given to those granted
protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
(DACA) program created by Democratic President Barack Obama and
extended by Republican President Donald Trump.
"We have many, many more important criminals to go after," he
said.
Trump has said Dreamers "have nothing to worry about," but
Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week said immigrants who
arrived in the United States as children were "subject to being
deported."
On Sunday, Sessions walked back his earlier statement.
“I believe that everyone that enters the country unlawfully is
subject to being deported; however, we've got -- we don't have
the ability to round up everybody and there's no plans to do
that," Sessions said on ABC. "But we're going to focus first, as
the president has directed us, on the criminal element."
On Feb. 17, Juan Manuel Montes, 23, who had lived in the United
States since he was 9, was deported from the border city of
Calexico, California, after being questioned by a U.S. Customs
and Border Protection (CBP) officer.
That was the first documented deportation of a Dreamer.
Kelly said in another Sunday interview on CBS that while
Dreamers are not being targeted, several of them end up detained
by immigration officers as they round up criminals.
"People fall into our hands incidentally that we have no choice
in most cases but to go ahead and put in the system," he said.
(Reporting By Valerie Volcovici; additional reporting by DOina
Chiacu; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
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