As President-elect Donald Trump’s team gets ready for Day One of mass deportations, Tom Homan, the incoming border czar, is warning that many illegal immigrants who have never been arrested before will be caught up in the arrests.
During a phone interview with the Washington Examiner, Homan provided some insight into how the Trump administration will arrest, detain, and deport hundreds of thousands or even millions of illegal immigrants living in the United States.
Homan said that immigrants whose only crime was coming into the country illegally should be sent back to their home country, even if they are just living with or related to someone who has an arrest warrant out for them.
“In sanctuary cities, expect a lot of collateral arrests. I mean, not priority criminal arrests. We can’t get the bad guy in jail. That means we have to go into the communities and find them, and there may be others. We expect a lot of collateral arrests,” Homan said.
The federal office that enforces immigration laws in the U.S. does not move illegal immigrants from local and state police jails to federal custody. However, sanctuary cities and states like California do not let U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement do this.
Sanctuary towns and states across the country, which are mostly run by Democrats, say it is not their job to work for the federal government or work with federal law enforcement partners.
For ICE, it means they have to arrest people at their homes, places of work, or anywhere else. Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance have said they will start by arresting people with criminal records and the 1.4 million people who have been told by a judge to be deported but have not been sent back to their home country.
“There’s over 700,000 criminal aliens with criminal convictions,” Homan said.
The Biden government told ICE that they should focus on arresting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes.
People who are in the country illegally will be included in these categories after Trump takes office.
“ICE is going to do what they’re good at,” Homan said.
As Trump said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, the mass deportations could include millions of people who are in the country illegally, saying, “You have no choice” but to deport everyone who is illegally in the U.S.
Trump said as a candidate for president in November that he would remove as many people as ever before. While running for president in 2016, Trump made immigration and crime major issues. He did the same thing this time.
With the help of a GOP-led Congress, he could do more on both problems than he did in his first term. For example, he chose Homan as border czar and Stephen Miller as a senior White House aide.
Trump will not wait until January 20, 2025, to start planning how to remove more people. ICE and the Trump administration will start planning ways to do this right away. Homan said on Monday that big plans are already being made for the plans.
“We’re starting across the country on the same day” that Trump takes office, he said.
“Twenty-four [ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations] field offices — some cover two or three states,” Homan said. “Every field office will be given the direction that they are to begin looking for, arresting, detaining, removing those in the United States that have been arrested for a crime.”
Homan said he wants to get military planes to help move people who are in jail from one place to another.
“I hope we get to that,” Homan said. “We could use them as a force multiplier.”
At the moment, ICE hires 13 planes from a private company to carry illegal immigrants in jail inside the country and for flights to send them back to their home country. Homan said he told them he wanted planes.
“I made it clear that I want their assistance,” Homan said.
