Trump's pick for AG once questioned value of border wall

President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, William Barr, once questioned the value of a wall along the Mexican border similar to the one the president has advocated, describing the idea as "overkill."
His former chief of staff John Kelly told The Los Angeles Times in an interview published Sunday that Trump had abandoned the notion of "a solid concrete wall early on in the administration." The president seemed to respond to Kelly with a tweet Monday morning saying "an all concrete Wall was NEVER ABANDONED."
In the 1992 interview with PBS host Jim Lehrer, Barr said the Justice Department was taking steps to control illegal immigration and that "there are some barriers that have reduced violence and made it easier to interdict the aliens crossing."

But he expressed ambivalence about an expansive wall, saying, "They generally try to go up through certain specified routes and, in fact, we're only talking about a 200-mile area where there's appreciable crossings, illegal crossings, and in fact, 40 to 50 per cent of the illegal crossings in the United States occur on a 14-mile stretch south of San Diego."
Barr defended the legality of Trump's travel ban in a February 2017 Washington Post opinion piece, saying complaints that it was discriminatory were "baseless" since only a handful of countries were singled out and the criterion for their inclusion "was not that they were Muslim but that the risk of terrorist infiltration from these countries is especially high."