Tom Homan, President-elect Trump's pick as "border czar," said the incoming Republican administration will "absolutely" use the gifted Texas land as a part of their deportation program.
“We absolutely will. When we find somebody, a targeted enforcement operation, when they get arrested, they'll be detained,” Homan said during his Wednesday appearance on Fox News’ “'The Ingraham Angle.”
"They have to be detained for a short time while we get travel documents from their host country. [The] host country has to agree that, 'yeah, they're our national' - we get travel documents. We get flight arrangements, flight agreements. So we're going to detain them for a little while," he added.
Homan's remarks come just a day after Texas officials offered Trump a 1,400-acre ranch for his mass deportation plan. Dawn Buckingham, the land commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, said on Tuesday her office is "fully prepared" to cooperate with federal agencies that will carry out Trump's immigration agenda. The 1,402-acre lot is in Starr County.
Trump has vowed on the campaign trail to perform the "largest deportation effort in American history." He signaled on Monday that he would declare an immigration national emergency and utilize military assets to carry out his deportation pledge.
Despite Texas officials siding with Trump's immigration plan, some other parts of the country are looking to protect immigrants before the president-elect's inauguration in January. Los Angeles City Council unanimously passed a "sanctuary city" ordinance to shield migrants in the city.
Homan said on Wednesday that the ordinance will not matter.
"Sanctuary states said they're not allowing any detention facilities in their state -- fine. Then we'll arrest them. We'll fly them out of the state and detain them outside the state, again, away -- away from their families, their attorneys," Homan told host Laura Ingraham. "That's what you want, that's what you get."
“You're not going to stop us doing what we're going to do,” he added on Wednesday. “So we'll move them to a state where we can detain them. There's plenty of sheriffs across this country who are willing to give us empty beds. They want the funding and we can put them in a jail all across the country.”
Homan, who said earlier this month that the GOP administration will perform workplace raids, argued that “we'll have no problem finding a place to detain these people.”
It's going to cost money, so we got to have the money to do it," he said. "But President Trump's going to do everything he can to make sure we had the funds to do this."
