Donald Trump’s “border czar” is pledging to bring back the practice of family detention for undocumented immigrants.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Tom Homan, who oversaw the family separation policy as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first term, said that the next Trump administration will be holding families in detention centers and won’t hesitate to deport undocumented parents with U.S.-born children.
“Here’s the issue,” Homan told the Post. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”
“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” Homan added. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”
In the first Trump term, ICE used facilities known as “residential centers,” which contained 3,000 beds similar to dormitories. Immigration activists and doctors criticized them as creating a harmful environment for children. This time around, with Trump’s plan to increase deportations on a massive scale, ICE plans to house immigrant families with “soft-sided” tent structures, Homan said.
President Biden ended the family detention policy in 2021, and the federal judge who oversees immigration detention has put a 20-day limit on how long children can be held at an immigration facility. Trump has repeatedly promised an overhaul of Biden’s immigration policies, pledging mass deportations for millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States.
Trump is already getting pushback on his deportation plans, which is probably a contributing factor as to why Homan said he hasn’t committed to a target number of deportations.
“I’ll be setting myself up for disappointment,” Homan said, telling the Post that he doesn’t know how much resources he’ll have.
