President-elect Donald Trump’s selection to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), former Marine General John Kelly, should be “disqualified” from the post due to his “brutal” treatment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center, attorneys warned Tuesday ahead of Kelly’s Senate confirmation hearing.

However, for a position charged with carrying out the orders of a president who wants to wall-off a country, target Muslims, as well as bring back waterboarding —and “worse”—the former general who oversaw the controversial military prison might be just what Trump is looking for.

As former head of U.S. Southern Command, Kelly was responsible for all U.S. military activities in South and Central America, including Guantánamo.

Pointing to the human rights abuses that occurred on his watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which has led the legal battle against Guantánamo and represents a number of its detainees, said Kelly’s “aggressive oversight of the illegal military prison…disqualifies him” from leading DHS. 

“Presiding over a population of detainees not charged or convicted of crimes, over whom he had maximum custodial control, Kelly treated them with brutality,” CCR said. “His response to the detainees’ peaceful hunger strike in 2013 was punitive force-feeding, solitary confinement, and rubber bullets. Furthermore, he sabotaged efforts by the Obama administration to resettle detainees, consistently undermining the will of his commander in chief.”

“His temperament and actions make him unfit to lead an agency that currently holds tens of thousands of immigrants, including many fleeing violence and many in long-term indefinite detention,” the group states.

Indeed, as head of Homeland Security, Kelly “would be responsible for implementing some of Trump’s most controversial policy pledges, including mass deportations, curtailing immigration from some Muslim majority countries, and enhanced security at the southern border,” the Guardian observed.