This article was first published on November 10, 2024
Donald Trump’s administration will seek to expand the use of the US army to round up and deport undocumented migrants in “targeted operations” from day one of his presidency, according to the man tipped to lead the president-elect’s mass deportation programme.
Tom Homan, former head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term, said that he would spearhead a programme of unprecedented scope where every person who is in the US illegally — which he estimates to be about 20 million people — would be at risk of deportation.
“Bottom line: if you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table,” he said. “You’ve got to prioritise where you go first, but again, it’s a crime to enter this country illegally.”
In an interview with The Sunday Times before he was confirmed as Trump’s “border tsar” Homan said that he would also move to completely shut down the US southern border, build a wall and restart Trump’s “remain in Mexico” programme, under which migrants waited across the border to have their asylum applications processed.
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“People say, well, it sounds awful cruel, you want to remove millions,” he said. “Let me say this. You have a historic illegal immigration crisis where you have numbers we’ve never seen before, in the millions and millions, of illegal aliens released in this country [and] we know the vast majority will not get asylum, so they don’t qualify.”
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Homan said he would seek to establish agreements, similar to the UK’s ill-fated Rwanda scheme, under which asylum seekers would wait in third countries for their applications to be processed. “We’d certainly reach out to other countries,” he said.
He dismissed claims that the administration would be building “concentration camps” to hold millions of people caught in massive sweeps of neighbourhoods.
Homan did, however, say that those slated for deportation would be held in facilities including newly built holding centres and that the military’s existing role in transporting them could be expanded to account for the rising number of deportees. Raids would follow the existing ICE rulebook, he said, and would be targeted in specific locations.
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“We’re going to concentrate on the worst of the worst,” he said, describing the start of operations. “It’s going to be a lot different to what the liberal media is saying it’s going to be.”
Having won a decisive victory in the US presidential election, as well as a majority in the Senate and possibly the House of Representatives, where votes are still being counted, Trump’s allies say that he will be well equipped to carry out the programme.
Trump, who has spoken about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, has floated the idea of invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a law more than 200 years old that allows the president to deport non-citizens who come from a country that the US is at war with.
He could also use his presidential executive powers to enact parts of the operation and issue a national emergency declaration on his first day in the White House, which The Wall Street Journal reported could allow him to unlock funds from the Pentagon and use military bases and planes to carry out deportations. Stephen Miller, a senior adviser and a leading architect of the deportation scheme, has said that should states object to it, National Guard units from Republican states could be sent to carry out the measures.
Late last year the US border force reported record high numbers of “encounters”, a rough measure of how many people are attempting to cross, on the southern border. This summer, President Biden issued an executive order that banned migrants crossing the border from seeking asylum. Since then, numbers of encounters have fallen dramatically.
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The damage, however, has been done. About eight million migrants have entered the US illegally since Biden came to power in 2020. Voters across the ideological spectrum say that securing the border is among their most pressing priorities.
Homan would seek to expand the existing role of the US military in assisting in deportations, he said.
“The military has helped on the border for the last six presidents, so it’s nothing new that the DoD [Department of Defence] will assist,” he said. “I don’t see them making arrests, they don’t have immigration authority, but they can certainly do transportation. They can certainly do infrastructure-building, they can certainly help build these facilities and help finish the wall with the Army Corps of Engineers.”
Under the new administration, Homan said, people would still be able to claim asylum in the US, though he would end the existing programme of “catch and release” whereby those arriving over the border are briefly registered, then allowed to live (and potentially work) in the US until their asylum hearing, often in two to three years’ time.
“Of course there has to be historic deportation, because we had historic immigration where nine out of ten are going to lose their [asylum] case and the judge is going to say, you must go home,” he added.
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If those fleeing persecution passed through another safe country on the way to the US, Homan said, they should seek asylum there.
The economic impact of deporting 20 million people, or even starting the process of doing so, would be unprecedented. It could send food prices spiking and cause untold damage to the US farming industry, given that half of agricultural workers are undocumented.
According to one study by the American Immigration Council, a pro-migrant campaign group, deporting 11 million people who are in the country illegally and 2.3 million who crossed the border last year would cost at least $315 billion. In the modern immigration enforcement era, the study noted, the US has never deported more than half a million immigrants a year. Many of those may have been migrants caught trying to cross the border, rather than those living in the country.
“There is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible,” the authors wrote. They noted that the entire US prison population in 2022 was 1.9 million people, far smaller than the population of undocumented immigrants.
Homan shrugged off the concerns. “What I’m hearing a lot about is that it’s going to be a massive cost to do this operation, billions of dollars every year,” he said. “Here’s what I’ll say: it’s going to be a cost saving for the American people. We’re spending billions and billions of dollars on the care of illegal aliens, between medical care, hospital care, schooling, all the money we’re spending on these hotels.”
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Undocumented migrants commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than US citizens, and most mainstream economists argue that immigration is far more significant as a driver of economic growth than a drag on social spending.
Those at risk of deportation would include people who had entered the country illegally and also those who had overstayed their visas while in the US. It is not clear, Homan said, what the status of the so-called Dreamers, undocumented migrants who were taken to the US as children, would be.
The closure of the border would, he said, rob people-smuggling gangs, which are run by the Mexican cartels, of their income. Trump was “committed to taking these cartels on personally” and would designate them as terrorist organisations, he said.
Should countries refuse to take back the deportees, as Venezuela has done in the past, Homan said that Trump would force their hand.
“President Trump is going to demand that these countries do something or face consequences,” he said, adding that the president could — as in his first term — threaten governments with tariffs and with the removal of international aid payments in order to force them to comply with US policies. “When you have a strong president who makes them do what they should do and what they’re supposed to do, that’s going to come a long way.
“The ideal success is: crime rate goes down, illegal immigration goes down, lives are saved,” he said. “That’s the ideal outcome.”