President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming border czar Tom Homan has pushed back against critics, claiming that “legal immigrants are perfectly safe” from the administration’s mass deportation efforts.
Trump has pledged to deport tens of millions of undocumented migrants, a group which includes people who have lived in the US for decades. Some have also voiced concerns that the administration could go after immigrants who are citizens or try denaturalization of longstanding citizens.
Homan appeared on Fox Business, where host Elizabeth MacDonald showed clips of MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace noting that Homan has connections to Project 2025, the conservative agenda for the next Republican administration that Trump has been attempting to distance himself from, and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro saying that Homan has a “cowboy attitude.”
Castro also said that Trump’s immigration agenda will need “a lot of pushback” and Ana Navarro, the co-host of The View, said, “When he says ‘Yes, families can be deported together,’ what he is saying, is that US citizens can be deported.”
“Are you saying that, Tom?” MacDonald asked Homan.
The incoming border czar said that US citizens and legal immigrants “are perfectly safe, for God’s sake.”
Homan responded to a question from CBS late last month in which he was asked about going ahead with mass deportations without separating families.
“Families can be deported together,” Homan said at the time.
He also claimed in his Fox Business appearance that the Biden administration has “deported families together.”
“If these people demand due process, they demand the right to claim asylum, they demand the right” to see a judge, “and we give [that] to them at ... taxpayer cost, at the end of that due process, if [a] federal judge [says] ‘You must go home,’ they have to go home,” Homan said. “If they don’t, then what the hell are we doing?”
Jessica Tarlov, a co-host of The Five on Fox News, addressed Homan’s comments, saying that a “key contributor” to Project 2025 had been put in charge of immigration enforcement.
“Tom Homan was interviewed on 60 Minutes and asked ‘Is there a way to carry about mass deportation without separating families?’ He said ... families can be deported together,” Tarlov noted. “He also said ... ‘if someone was going to be rounded up and grandma was in the house and she is undocumented, it didn’t necessarily mean she wouldn’t be taken too’.”
“You can say Donald Trump has the mandate until you’re blue in the face, taking grandma is not what people were voting for,” she added. “They were voting for criminals to be kicked out of this country.”
Commentator Ed Krassenstein wrote on X that “most Americans ... don’t want the US-born children (American citizens) of undocumented immigrants forced to leave. They don’t want Grandma deported. And many don’t want hardworking contributors to our economy expelled, either.”
He added: “People voted for stronger borders, but what they’re getting looks like an extreme approach. Trump didn’t tell you the whole story. We’re going to see videos of young American kids deported alongside their immigrant parents. We’ll see elderly women being forced to leave.”
Homan said on Monday that the incoming Trump administration will conduct workplace raids to find illegal immigrants.
During an appearance on Fox & Friends on Monday, the former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the raids would take aim at labor and sex trafficking.
“Where do we find most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking? At worksites,” Homan said.
But immigration advocates have said the tactic probably won’t address the problem.
The director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center, Heidi Altman, said Homan is “conflating the traffickers with the people being trafficked,” according to The Hill. “Tom Homan is skilled at using public safety rhetoric to justify vicious tactics that tear families apart.”
During his stint in the first Trump administration, Homan pushed for the “zero tolerance” policy which led to the separation of more than 4,000 children from their families.
While Homan told Fox that he’ll mainly target “public safety threats and national security threats,” he also said that foreigners with deportation orders become fugitives, meaning that immigrants without criminal pasts but with a deportation order could be prioritized for removal.
