US President-elect Donald Trump said late on Sunday he was bringing back hardline immigration official Tom Homan to oversee the country’s borders in the incoming administration.
“I am pleased to announce that the Former ICE Director, and stalwart on Border Control, Tom Homan, will be joining the Trump Administration, in charge of our Nation’s Borders (“The Border Czar”),” Trump posted on his social network Truth Social.
“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” he said.
Trump said Homan will be in charge of “all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin”.
The 78-year-old Republican has pledged to launch — on day one of his presidency — the largest deportation operation of undocumented immigrants in US history.
He repeatedly railed against irregular immigrants during his campaign, employing violent rhetoric about those who “poison the blood” of the United States.
In 2017, when Homan was acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, during Trump’s first administration, the number of immigrants arrested soared by nearly 40 percent compared with the previous year.
The belief that there are no barriers for people who want to enter the country has been a central part of the Trump campaign – a rhetoric that portrays immigrants as criminals and a drain on the country’s resources.
“The day after I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” Trump said last week at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he described migrants as “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals” and promised to “kick them out of the country”.
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While the US government has struggled for years to manage its southern border with Mexico, Trump has claimed an “invasion” is under way by migrants who he says will “rape and murder” Americans.
In rally speeches, he exaggerated local tensions and misled his audiences about immigration statistics and policy. Violent crime, which spiked under Trump, has fallen in every year of President Joe Biden’s administration, though foreign suspects have been named in a few high-profile cases of violent attacks on women and children.
Yet, research shows that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes, and undocumented workers pay taxes that contribute to social programmes that they themselves are unable to access.
The number of US border patrol encounters with migrants crossing over from Mexico “illegally” is now about the same as in 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency, after peaking at a record 250,000 for the month of December 2023.
Trump promised to tackle migrant gangs using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – which allows the federal government to round up and deport foreigners belonging to enemy countries – as part of a mass deportation drive he christened “Operation Aurora”.
Aljazeera.com
