John Kelly says illegal immigrants aren't bad people, they just "don't integrate well"

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly doesn’t think undocumented immigrants are bad people, he just doesn’t think they "integrate well."

He made the comments in a wide-ranging interview with NPR Thursday on recent administration policies and his place in the White House. Asked about the zero-tolerance policy at the border, Kelly stressed that while all immigrants aren’t necessarily gang members, they’re from rural backgrounds and don’t speak English, which means they don’t belong. As head of the Department of Homeland Security for the first half of 2017, Kelly oversaw a significant crackdown on border crossing and illegal immigration — a crackdown that impressed President Trump.

“Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They're not criminals. They're not MS-13,” the former Marine general said.

“But they're also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They're overwhelmingly rural people,” he continued. “They don't speak English; obviously that's a big thing.”

And he's not worried about families being separated at the border, as a consequence of the new DHS policy of criminally prosecuting everyone coming across illegally: “The children will be take care of — put into foster care or whatever,” Kelly told NPR. “But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”

Still, he thinks that those with Temporary Protected Status, a program that the Department of Homeland Security recently decided to end, should be offered a path to citizenship.

Here are some other highlights from Kelly’s interview with NPR:

"He's very strong in terms of trade, taxes, business, and he's a quick study on everything else," Kelly told NPR. "He's a pretty bright guy."

But Kelly’s reportedly called Trump an “idiot.” After an immigration-related meeting, Kelly told staffers, “He doesn't even understand what DACA is. He's an idiot," Kelly said, according to two unnamed staffers who spoke to NBC News. "We've got to save him from himself."

Recent reports from the Washington Post and Vanity Fair have suggested that Trump doesn’t like Kelly as much as Kelly seems to think. He’s lost his power as disciplinarian, the Post has reported, because Trump doesn’t get along with Kelly’s protege, Kirstjen Nielsen. She took over from Kelly as head of the Department of Homeland Security when Kelly moved to the White House. Nielsen has reportedly drafted a letter of resignation after being berated in a meeting with Trump on Wednesday, according to the New York Times.

Asked whether he has plans to leave the White House, Kelly said no. “In retrospect, I wish I had been here from Day One," he told NPR. "I think in some cases in terms of staffing or serving the president that first six months was pretty chaotic and there were people some people hired that maybe shouldn't have."

"My view is to speak truth to power. I always give my opinion on everything. He always listens," he went on. "Sometimes he takes the opinion, sometimes he doesn't."

Kelly wouldn’t say that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt,” as the president has called it repeatedly, but he did suggest it had gone on long enough and that he doesn’t think it will uncover anything incriminating about Trump.

“Something that has gone on this long without any real meat on the bone, it suggests to me that there is nothing there, relative to our president,” he said.

The only times he gets frustrated, Kelly says, is when he reads bad coverage of himself or his coworkers in the press.

"There's times of great frustration, mostly because of the stories I read about myself or others that I think the world of, which is just about everybody who works at the complex and wonder whether it's worth it to be subjected to that," he said.

Kelly agrees with Trump on pulling out of the Iran deal, one of the Obama administration’s diplomatic achievements aimed at keeping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. “I mean it really was a horrible deal,” he said, and pulling out won’t hurt chances for peace in the Middle East, according to Kelly.

And he thinks Trump is swift enough not to get hoodwinked by Kim Jong Un: “I know he won't fall for it in the same way that past presidents have, that get strung along, strung along lifting sanctions, giving them money, and get nothing for it,” he said.