Today, Mayor Adams will meet with Tom Homan, former acting ICE director — never confirmed, on account of the likely failure of his nomination — and Donald Trump’s pick for the somewhat hazy position of “border czar,” likely some sort of coordinator of overarching federal immigration policy.
We don’t know what exactly Homan will say or what he’ll put on the table, but the one-time political commentator has spent recent years railing against sanctuary cities and threatening their leaders, including recently with prosecution for daring to not cooperate with the Trump administration’s intended immigration crackdown.
We also don’t know what the mayor will tell Homan, but hopefully he will make the case that the city has picked up $6 billion in costs for caring for migrants, with barely a penny of help from feds, for what is supposed to be a federal responsibility. Any help with those expenses would be much appreciated.
What the mayor should also keep in mind is that when Homan et al talk about mass deportations, they’re not just talking about criminals or even the newly arrived migrants. Homan is talking about the people who work at your laundromat, the delivery workers bringing your food, construction workers, paralegals, nurses and home health aides and countless other longtime and law-abiding New Yorkers, who are either fully undocumented or have one of the administrative statuses Trump wants to terminate, namely DACA and TPS.
There are two things that cannot be true at once: the incoming Trump administration cannot both be predominantly going after violent criminals, as they’ve often maintained, and simultaneously hoping to detain and deport 15 million people or more.
There simply aren’t that many violent criminals, not just among the ranks of the nation’s immigration population, but in the entire country. These numbers are only remotely possible if the government undertakes a relatively indiscriminate, neighborhood-by-neighborhood campaign of detentions, going even beyond the total number of undocumented people in the United States.
Will Trump, Homan and anti-immigrant guru Stephen Miller have the logistical and legal capacity to execute this campaign to the parameters they’ve laid out? Probably not, but this is without a doubt their ultimate aim, even if they never get there. Even at a fraction of their total desired detentions and removals, this effort will do enormous damage to the legal, social, political and economic fabric of a country that has built its strength and reputation on mass immigration going back two centuries.
We hope the mayor will stress to Homan that all 8 million people living in the city are part of his constituency and immigrants are not a separate population. They are not; even if many of these folks ultimately cannot vote for him, or at all, that doesn’t make them any less an integral part of the working class New Yorkers that Adams so often touts.
While Adams has talked about changing the sanctuary city laws to facilitate more cooperation with ICE, he should make clear to Homan he’s not talking about mass roundups that could threaten the economic vibrancy and viability of a city that is around 40% foreign-born.
As for Mr. Homan, it’s just a short hop from City Hall to the Battery to see the Statue of Liberty. Homan should take in the view.
