Tom Homan came off mostly like a schoolyard bully when he swaggered into a Republican gathering Monday evening on the Northwest Side and announced that Chicago would be ground zero for mass deportations.
He offered little beyond tough talk on the border crisis, very little in the way of data and long-term policy solutions. Instead, Homan just sounded obsessed with retaliating hard against Chicago, which has been a thorn in the side of President-elect Donald Trump that's as big as the antenna atop the Willis Tower.
Right away, it was clear Homan's speech would be about winning over the crowd by tossing out junior-high insults.
"Chicago’s in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks," the president-elect's border czar said, drawing cheers by taking jabs at Brandon Johnson and JB Pritkzer while inviting them to help facilitate the deportation of undocumented immigrants.
Making Chicago ground zero is about politics, not the numbers.
Of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., just 425,000 live in Illinois. But consider Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott got so worked up about the southern border crisis that he spent more than $148 million busing tens of thousands of migrants to Chicago and other cities, in a political stunt to make Democratic-led cities look bad — 1.7 million undocumented immigrants live there.
Florida, another Republican-led state where Gov. Ron DeSantis has also spent millions sending migrants elsewhere, has 772,000.
Then there's California (if Homan and Trump insist on a Democratic target) — home to 2.7 million undocumented people.
Imagine if a Biden adviser had flown to Dallas or Houston, declaring that their mayors "suck," the Texas governor “sucks” and that the White House wants Texas to either get with the program or risk being de-funded. That's government by coercion, not cooperation.
Homan had an additional message for Johnson who, like Pritkzer, has expressed that he isn't willing to play ball with the incoming Trump administration: "Get the hell out of the way." Homan might as well have puffed out his chest and thrown on a cowboy hat like a B-western villain and growled, "There's a new sheriff in town."
Who can forget that the "new sheriff" — Trump, who is returning to the Oval Office next month — has made clear that he plans to punish the city that essentially drove him out of town during his first presidential campaign in any way he can during his second term. “I think Chicago is going to be made an example of,” a Trump insider told the Washington Post recently, describing discussions underway on how to strip federal funding from Democratic cities if they resist deportations.
No one could have expected anything different from Homan, who has warned migrants “we’re coming for you.” Homan “deports people. And he’s really good at it,” as one 2016 story about the former police officer who served in the Obama administration begins.
Joining forces with Trump, who has repeatedly demonized Mexicans and stoked xenophobia among his supporters, Homan is aiming to deport millions of immigrants. He denied the plan is "racist," though most of those being targeted are Brown. He and Trump have said they are focused on deporting criminals, but non-criminals will likely get swept up too.
"When they go find that bad guy, and when they find him, he’s probably going to be with others," Homan said Monday. "Others that are not a priority because they’re not a criminal. But guess what? They’re going to be arrested, too.”
The more than 51,000 asylum seekers and migrants, mostly from Venezuela, who were flown and bused to Chicago by Abbott since 2022 are also at risk of being deported. They have temporary protected status granted by the Biden administration, but Trump is likely to try and revoke that status. Homan insisted Monday that asylum-seekers aren't running away from persecution but are looking for "a job."
As for Trump's promise to protect "dreamers," young people who were brought to the U.S. as children — well, the best approach with Trump is to believe nothing until it actually happens.
It's all part of an anti-immigrant playbook that relies on political games and bullying rather than real, and humane, solutions to fix the nation's broken immigration system. Remember that Congress hammered out bipartisan immigration reform, only to have Trump tell GOP lawmakers to stand down so he could make the border crisis a focus of his presidential campaign.
This isn't about fixing immigration. It's about politics and looking tough.
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