Thomas Homan will deport people for Trump — as he did for Obama
President-elect Donald Trump has picked former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan to serve as a “border czar” for the incoming administration.
Trump’s selection of Homan, 62, for the post was widely expected.
“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote as he announced Homan’s new job on the Truth Social platform late Sunday night. Homan’s duties will include overseeing the borders with Mexico and Canada, as well as the U.S. coastline and airspace, Trump said.
Trump, who has promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, said that would also be part of Homan’s portfolio. “Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin,” Trump wrote.
In his second week in office in 2017, Trump appointed Homan as the acting director of ICE. In November of that year, Trump nominated him to be ICE’s permanent director, but the Senate never acted on his nomination.
Homan played a key role in designing and carrying out Trump’s highly controversial family separation policy, under which children crossing the southern border into the U.S. without legal permission were separated from their parents or other adults so those people could be criminally prosecuted. The policy, sometimes referred to as “zero tolerance,” began in 2017 and ramped up in early 2018 before the administration backed away from it after large numbers of Americans denounced it as inhumane. [Continue reading…]
Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan said Monday that President-elect Trump’s administration will crank up workplace raids as part of its broader immigration crackdown.
Speaking on “Fox & Friends,” the former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said workplace raids would address labor and sex trafficking.
“Where do we find most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking? At worksites,” Homan told Steve Doocy.
But advocates say that approach is unlikely to help combat trafficking.
“He’s conflating the traffickers with the people being trafficked,” said Heidi Altman, director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center.
“Tom Homan is skilled at using public safety rhetoric to justify vicious tactics that tear families apart.” [Continue reading…]
Thomas Homan deports people. And he’s really good at it.
Homan is the Washington bureaucrat in charge of rounding up, detaining and kicking illegal immigrants out of the country. As Americans fight over whether the next president should build a wall on the Mexico border to keep migrants out or protect millions of them from deportation, Homan is actually hunting undocumented immigrants down right now, setting strategy for 8,000 officers on the front lines.
He was honored last week with the government’s highest civil service award, bestowed on federal leaders whose work gets “extraordinary” results. According to his bosses at the Department of Homeland Security, not only did Homan successfully handle an unexpected surge of unaccompanied children and families who have streamed here from Central America across the Southwest border, but last year his operations set records for the share of illegal immigrants expelled from the U.S. who had criminal records.
Many of President Obama’s immigration policies have been unpopular with immigration advocates who say he has not done enough to overhaul a system that relies on deportations. But Homeland Security officials were intent on plugging Homan’s success.
“The first thing I do when I get into the office every day is I read the media stories about immigration,” he said in an interview before receiving a 2015 Presidential Rank Award for distinguished service at a banquet at State Department Thursday night put on by the Senior Executives Association’s Professional Development League. [Continue reading…]