President-elect Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan vowed to build “family facilities” to detain and deport the massive number of migrants who have entered the country illegally in recent years — along with their US-born children.
Tens of thousands of migrant families would be able to be detained in the “soft-sided” tent structures before their deportation, Homan told the Washington Post in an in an interview published Thursday.
But despite the aggressive removal operation slated to begin on Day One of Trump’s second term, the border czar promised that non-citizen parents with American children will have the opportunity to choose whether they want to be split up or be deported together.
“We need to show the American people we can do this and not be inhumane about it,” he said. “We can’t lose the faith of the American people.”
Homan, 63, has pledged to carry out the largest deportation operation in US history and previously stipulated that those who crossed the border illegally will not be spared from the removals, even if they are part of family units that include citizens.
“Here’s the issue,” he added. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”
Congress will have to allocate sufficient funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to complete the operation, which Homan projected will be much “larger” than President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s effort to kick out 1.1 million Mexican laborers in 1954.
A former ICE official himself, Homan has estimated the agency will need at least 100,000 beds for detentions and at least $86 billion in funding for the mass exodus.
“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” he told the Washington Post. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”
The deportations will not involve “sweeps” through neighborhoods — as some of Homan’s critics have contended.
“I don’t see this thing as being sweeps and the military going through neighborhoods,” he noted, arguing it will be “targeted” to those with criminal records.
There will also be a separate plan to find the more than 300,000 migrant children that have gone missing since crossing the border, according to the incoming border czar.
The missing migrant kids have been of particular concern to Trump, who raised the alarm on the campaign trail about documented instances of the unaccompanied minors being used for forced labor or exploited by sex traffickers.
“I think some of these children will be in forced labor, and some will be in the sex trade,” Homan grimly assessed of the hundreds of thousands of migrant kids loose in the US.
“I think some will be perfectly fine,” he also said. “We just want to make sure.”
Trump, 78, is preparing other executive actions to dismantle retiring President Biden’s policies on Day One — including a “humanitarian parole” program that has let in up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela since January 2023.
The soon-to-be 47th president also has signaled he is intent on finishing construction of a southern border wall, revoking birthright citizenship and reinstating his “Remain in Mexico” policy to require migrants seeking asylum to await immigration court hearings outside the US.
