Chuck Todd to DHS Secretary Kelly: Is Deporting People "The Best Use Of Money"?

'Meet the Press' host Chuck Todd asks Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly if deporting millions of people is "the best use of money." "Is this the resources you need?" he asked. "That you need to hire more people to deal with this issue? Is that your number one problem?" <blockquote>CHUCK TODD: You say it's on Congress, but there is others that say if you just enforce the law on the books. So what is the issue? Are the laws on the books hard to enforce and they need to be changed? Is that what you're saying here? SEC. JOHN KELLY: Well, the laws on the books are pretty straightforward. If you're here illegally, you should leave or you should be deported, put through the system. But there are 11 million people and it's very complicated. There are people who came here as children. There are people here who came here illegally many years ago and have married local men and women and had children. It's a very complicated problem. But the law is the law. But I don't have an unlimited capacity to execute it. CHUCK TODD: Is this the best use of money? Is this the resources you need? That you need to hire more people to deal with this issue? Is that your number one problem? SEC. JOHN KELLY: Yeah, I think so. You know, there's two aspects. Of course, ICE operate more or less in the interior and do targeted actions against illegal aliens plus. What I mean by that is, just because you're in the United States illegally doesn't necessarily get you targeted. It's gotta be something else. And we're operating more or less at the other end of the spectrum, and that is criminals, multiple convictions... CHUCK TODD: I guess I'm going at this, would the money for the border wall be better spent on going after the visa overstays? And would that actually deal with the problem President Trump campaigned on? SEC. JOHN KELLY: Chuck, you really do have to secure the border somehow, first and foremost. The very, very, very good news is, for a lot of different reasons, the number of illegal aliens that are moving up from the south has dropped off precipitously. I mean we're down 65%, 70% in the last two months. These are the months that we should see a steep incline in illegal movement. It's down, as I say, by almost 70%.</blockquote>