United States President-elect Donald Trump has tapped several immigration hardliners for key administration posts, as he vows to oversee the largest-ever deportation of undocumented migrants.
Trump named former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Tom Homan as his “border czar” in a post on his social network Truth Social late Sunday.
“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote, adding that Homan will be in charge of “all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin”.
Trump then selected Stephen Miller, a longtime advisor who helped shape some of Trump’s most drastic first-term immigration policies, such as family separation, as his deputy chief of staff for policy.
“This is another fantastic pick by the president,” wrote Vice President-elect JD Vance in a post on X Monday, confirming the nomination.
This is another fantastic pick by the president. Congrats @StephenM! https://t.co/2kQCmbcRy3
— JD Vance (@JDVance) November 11, 2024
In addition, Trump picked Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, the president-elect said in a statement carried by several US media, including Reuters and the Associated Press. He described her as “an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter”.
Sefanik, who represents a New York district in the US Congress, confirmed her acceptance of the role in a statement to the New York Post, saying she was “truly honoured” and ready to advance Trump’s “peace through strength leadership”.
Stefanik is a staunch supporter of Israel who gained national attention during congressional hearings earlier this year about the handling of alleged instances of anti-Semitism at elite US universities.
Later on Monday, Trump announced that he had chosen former congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
While Stefanik and Zeldin’s posts require Senate confirmation, Homan’s and Miller’s do not.
Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from near Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, said his latest appointments show he is “concentrating now on proven loyalists”.
“That is the most important element that obviously his team is looking for that they want complete loyalty to the president-elect,” said Hanna, adding that the ongoing transition process is “critical” to putting in place the “nuts and bolts” of a future administration.
‘Kick them out of the country’
The early appointments of Homan and Miller also underscore one of Trump’s core campaign pledges — to crack down fiercely on immigration, which he has baselessly cast as a source of crime and economic hardship.
“The day after I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” Trump said last week at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he described migrants as “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals” and promised to “kick them out of the country”.
While the US government has struggled for years to manage its southern border with Mexico, Trump has claimed an “invasion” is under way by migrants who he says will “rape and murder” Americans.
In rally speeches, he exaggerated local tensions and misled his audiences about immigration statistics and policy. Violent crime, which spiked under Trump, has fallen in every year of President Joe Biden’s administration, though foreign suspects have been named in a few high-profile cases of violent attacks on women and children.
Yet, research shows that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes, and undocumented workers pay taxes that contribute to social programmes that they themselves are unable to access.
The number of US border patrol encounters with migrants crossing over from Mexico “illegally” is now about the same as in 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency, after peaking at a record 250,000 for the month of December 2023.
Trump promised to tackle migrant gangs using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – which allows the federal government to round up and deport foreigners belonging to enemy countries – as part of a mass deportation drive he christened “Operation Aurora”.
Aurora was the scene of a viral video showing armed Latinos rampaging through an apartment block that spurred sweeping, false narratives about the town under attack by Latin American migrants. Trump has similarly promoted the fictitious story that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating residents’ pets.
Homan and Miller have echoed Trump’s demeaning rhetoric towards migrants.
Speaking at a pro-Trump campaign rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden in late October, Miller drew loud cheers when he railed against what he called “decades of abuse” that he said the US people had endured.
“Their jobs stolen, looted from them and shipped to Mexico, Asia and foreign countries,” said Miller. “The lives of their loves ones ripped away from then by illegal aliens, criminal gangs and thugs who don’t belong in this country.”
Miller will serve under Trump’s newly appointed chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who co-led his presidential campaign and credited with running a disciplined, professional team.
Homan, who oversaw a 40 percent jump in immigrants’ arrests when he was ICE director in 2017, has said immigrants will need to be “looking over [their] shoulder” under a Trump administration.
“You’ve got my word. Trump comes back in January, I will be in his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen,” Homan said earlier this year at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC.
However, Homan has denied the US military would be involved in rounding up and arresting immigrants in the country illegally.
“It’s going to be a well-targeted, planned operation conducted by the men of ICE. The men and women of ICE do this daily. They’re good at it,” he told Fox News on Sunday. “It’s going to be done in a humane manner.”
Experts warn that the fevered rhetoric around immigration could worsen a humanitarian crisis at the border and make it easier to justify harsh policies. Last year, the International Organisation for Migration, a United Nations entity, named the journey across the US-Mexico border the “deadliest land route for migrants worldwide on record”.
