Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan plans to reinstate controversial family detention centers as part of the upcoming administration’s mass deportation efforts.
Homan told the Washington Post Thursday that his plans include building “soft tents” to keep families under one roof as they await deportation.
Detention centers have a long history of being inhospitable to humans and offering prison-like facilities to migrants. Homan, however, seemingly blames parents for having children, instead of acknowledging these dangerous conditions.
“Here’s the issue. You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position,” he said.
President Joe Biden closed family detention facilities in 2021 in an attempt to make the immigration system more humane and compassionate. In their place, his administration distributed ankle monitors and traceable cellphones, allowing families to reside in the United States as they awaited deportation hearings.
But after the end of Trump’s Title 42, which allowed for the swift deportation of undocumented immigrants at the border due to COVID-19 concerns, the Biden administration considered bringing back the facilities.
Homan served as the Obama-era head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and he has carried out deportation efforts over the past three decades. So if anyone recalls the inhumane conditions of these facilities, it should be Homan.
“There's barbed wire, there are prison guards,” a former volunteer said of a family detention center in 2007. “There's counts throughout the day so that people are in their cells for hours of the day, there's no free movement around the facility, the food was terrible. You know, it's just a prison.”
Despite supporting these facilities, Homan told the Washington Post that he wants to “show the American people we can do this and not be inhumane about it.”
Speaking on deportations as a whole, he said, “I don’t see this thing as being sweeps and the military going through neighborhoods.” Instead, it will be a “targeted” campaign aimed at people who have criminal convictions, gang affiliations, or those who are seen as a national security threat.
However, Homan sang a less empathetic tune during an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last week, during which he said the goal is for ICE officers and other agencies to assist them in arresting “as many targeted priority aliens as possible.”
When asked about a “target number” for deportations, Homan responded, “The target number is arresting as many people as we can possibly arrest with the resources I have.”
He also claimed that sanctuary cities will force ICE to make sweeping arrests of anyone who is considered undocumented.
“In sanctuary cities, we can’t arrest criminals in a jail because they won’t let us in the jail,” he said. “Which means instead of one agent arresting the bad guy in the jail, we have to send a whole team to the neighborhood.”
He also said that this retaliation will inevitably result in “nonpriority” undocumented immigrants being arrested “because immigration officers aren’t going to be told to walk away from somebody illegal.”
Homan has been coming for sanctuary cities for quite some time, even threatening to send additional law enforcement into cities like Los Angeles and Chicago where local law enforcement has been told not to release immigration information to ICE officials.
"If I gotta send twice as many officers to LA because we're not getting any assistance, then that's what we're going to do,” Homan told Newsmax in November. “We got a mandate. President Trump is serious about this. I'm serious about it. This is gonna happen with or without you."
