“I have a message for the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden has released into our country in violation of federal law: you better pack your bags”. This is what he said on stage at the Milwaukee convention Tom Homan, former head of ICE, the feared immigration police, whom Donald Trump has appointed “border czar” of the next administration with the specific task of “being responsible for all deportations of illegal aliens to their countries of origin”, as stated in last night’s Truth Social post.
In the list of authors of Project 2025, the controversial document published in recent months in which a far-right political agenda was outlined to be applied after Trump’s electoral victory, Homan in a recent interview with CBS to those who asked him if with Trump the highly criticized divisions of families at the border would return, he responded tersely: “Families can be deported together”.
A concept he put forward during the first Trump administration, when he said that parents must be presented “side by side” with their children in court: “We will at least put the parents on trial, is that cruel? I don’t think so.” Also then, we are talking about 2017, the then interim director of ICE, in front of Congress, claimed the fact that with Trump in the White House, undocumented immigrants “must be afraid”.
Homan left office in 2018 to retire, but in the year and a half that he was at the helm of the much-feared ‘migra’ – as Hispanic migrants call Ice – he was the public face of the deportation campaign that Trump was already leading then , defending the agency’s policy of arresting people who had been living in the US for years and attacking the so-called “sanctuary cities”, Democratic-led cities whose authorities refused to collaborate to identify and deport migrants without documents.
Trump’s plan
According to what was revealed before the elections, Trump’s team is preparing measures against Democratic-led cities and states that may oppose the new deportation plan, even considering a freeze on federal funding for their police departments. After basing his entire election campaign on the promise of the largest deportation of migrants in American history, Trump could sign an executive order on his first day in office to start the forced repatriation of millions of people.
Not only that: he also promised to sign a measure to deny American citizenship to the children of irregular migrants born in US territory, thus erasing with the stroke of a pen centuries of ‘ius soli’ in the nation created by immigrants. The measure would provoke immediate legal challenges.