Trump’s Former ICE Head’s Plan for Mass Deportation: More Family Separation or Deporting US Citizens

Tom Homan during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto/ZUMA

This year, former President Donald Trump’s central campaign pledge has been to conduct the “largest deportation operation in American history.”

In his first term, Trump couldn’t deliver mass deportation. This was partially a result of his administration’s haphazard policy implementation, but also because a mass deportation campaign would require an almost unimaginable amount of resources: Removing one million people from the country a year would cost an estimated $88 billion annually, according to the American Immigration Council.

Still, Trump’s potential second administration wants to try again, even if it appears they only have concepts of a plan for how to do carry out mass removal without bankrupting the economy and likely harming millions of immigrants and many more US citizens in the process.

On Sunday, Tom Homan, the one-time cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, appeared on 60 Minutes to sell the plan as not potentially catastrophic. Homan, the “architect” of family separation who said he didn’t “give a shit” about being sued over the infamous practice, has been defiantly positioning himself as the man to get the job done.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

But when asked by CBS’s Cecilia Vega how feasible—or humane—the rollout of a mass deportation proposal would be, his answers inspired little confidence.

“Let me tell you what it’s not going to be first,” Homan said. “It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he claimed, there would be “targeted arrests.” But, as I’ve reported before, that’s quite different from the actual plans Trump’s hardline adviser Stephen Miller has been publicly laying out:

When asked by the hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show how the mass deportations project would be realized, Miller said it would require a “switch to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller described going to every place where there are known congregations of “illegals” and taking people to federal detention. 

To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive holding facilities that could accommodate between 50,000 to 70,000 people at any given time. Such an undertaking, he said, “would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”

In an exercise of semantics, Homan went on to say he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but that “worksite enforcement operations” would be necessary. When Vega pressed him on how the agency would prioritize immigration enforcement against national security and public safety threats, he left no room for doubt that anyone would entered the United States unlawfully would be a potential target. “So you’re carrying out a targeted enforcement operation,” Vega said, “grandma is in the house. She’s undocumented. She gets arrested too?”

“It depends,” Homan said. “Let the [immigration] judges decide. We’re going to remove people that the judges order deported.”

As a retired government official, Homan has making the rounds of conservative media to declare an “invasion” at the southern border. And he has made an enterprise out of it by launching the nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc. and traveling across the country spreading fear-mongering about migrants.

When asked on 60 Minutes how many people would be deported under Trump’s proposed mass deportation operation, Homan said “you can’t answer that question” because it would depend on how many enforcement agents they would have. Currently, ICE has about 6,000 deportation officers. Arresting and removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, most of whom have been in the country for more then a decade, would require hiring hundreds of thousands of government employees.

“If there’s no memo, if there’s no plan, is this fully baked?” Vega asked.

“We’ve done it before,” Homan said, presumably referencing the less than successful slur-named militaristic “Operation Wetback” from the Eisenhower administration that Trump has repeatedly invoked as a model. But historians agree that campaign not only led to far fewer deportations than the federal government claimed, but also ensnared US citizens.

A mass deportation of the scale Trump and Homan have been touting would likely have the same result. And as immigration experts have noted, such a plan would negatively impact mixed-status households, potentially tearing families apart. To that, Homan offered an alternative. “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”