Deportations will continue every day and culminate in millions of illegal migrants being jettisoned from the US, as President Trump promised during the 2024 campaign, border czar Tom Homan says.
Homan, 63, declared Sunday that everyone who is in the US illegally is “on the table” for deportation and praised the Trump administration for sending a “strong signal to the world: Our border is closed.”
Homan — asked on ABC News’ “This Week,” “Is that going to be a constant commitment from the US military every single day to take deportees out?” — responded, “Yes.”
More than a thousand US troops have been dispatched to the southern border to aid efforts to secure it. Homan affirmed that military planes will continue being used to help fly illegal migrants out of the country.
“You’re going to see the numbers steadily increase, the number of arrests nationwide, as we open up the aperture,” he said. “Right now, it’s concentrating on public safety threats [and] national security threats. That’s a smaller population.
“So we’re going to do this on a priority [basis], that’s President Trump’s promise. But as that aperture opens, there’ll be more arrests nationwide.”
The border czar did not say where he’d like the daily deportation levels to end up, simply explaining that his objective is “as many as we can get.”
Homan has spent decades toiling on immigration policy, having started out as a US Customs and Border Patrol agent before working his way up to acting director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the first Trump administration.
In his new role as border czar, Homan has authority over all US borders, according to Trump. Homan has long been a hardliner on border security.
“If you’re in the country illegally, you’re on the table because it’s not OK to, you know, violate the laws of this country,” Homan said. “We have millions of people standing in line, taking the test, doing their background investigation, paying the fees, that want to come in the right way.”
Before Trump returned to the White House, Homan vowed that the administration would crack down on “sanctuary cities,” Democratic strongholds that have policies that deliberately limit their cooperation with the feds on deportation efforts.
“Sanctuary cities lock us out of the jails. So instead of ICE being able to arrest the bad guy … sanctuary cities release them back in the community, which endangers the community,” Homan said.
The beefed-up deportation efforts have drawn criticism, particularly from Democrats, but Homan insisted that the Trump administration is simply following the law.
“We’re enforcing laws Congress enacted and the president signed, if they don’t like it, change the law,” he said of those opposed to the new push. “I find it hard to believe any member of Congress is telling us not to enforce the law that they enacted and they fund us to do.”
Republicans in Congress are eyeing a sprawling legislative agenda package on border security, energy reform, tax cuts, increased defense spending and more.
Details are still being ironed out about how much money those reforms will entail, and Homan was coy about how much he thinks Congress needs to up the budget on border security.
“This is the No. 1 issue that people voted on. And I think Congress has a mandate to give us [the] money we need,” he said. “What price you put on national security?
“What price [would] you put on all these young ladies that have been raped and murdered and burned alive?” he added of some victims of illegal migrants.
“What price [would] you put on Laken Riley’s life?” Homan added, referring to the Georgia co-ed killed by an illegal migrant in February.
But Homan did make one specific ask: to get a minimum of 100,000 new beds to hold the illegal migrants till deportation.
Homan underscored that “Congress needs to come to the table quick and give us the money we need to secure that border.”
