Donald Trump Appoints Tom Homan as ‘border tsar’
By
OSABUOHIEN VIVIAN ROSE
U.S President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to order mass deportation on the day he takes office, a spokeswoman for his transition team said yesterday.
Trump spoke on the campaign trail of targeting up to 20 million people as part of a crackdown echoing, though far exceeding, the deportations of up to 1.3 million Mexican undocumented immigrants by the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s.
Now policy advisers are drawing up dozens of executive orders for him to sign after his inauguration on January 20, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for his transition team told Fox News.
“On day one he’s going to open the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in American history,” Leavitt said.
Trump would restore the “remain in Mexico” policy that requires migrants seeking asylum to remain on the southern side of the border until their court date, she said. Other orders would seek “to expedite fracking and drilling” and to reverse orders signed by President Biden.
“This man is already working around the clock,” Leavitt said of Trump.
On Sunday Trump announced that Tom Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), would be in his “border tsar”.
Homan would be “in charge of our nation’s borders … including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security”, Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
There were further signs over the weekend that loyalty to the president-elect will be a crucial quality for anyone seeking a role in his administration. On Saturday evening Trump announced that neither Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations who ran against him in the Republican primary, nor Mike Pompeo, the CIA director during Trump’s first administration, would be considered for a job.
It was reported that the statement on Truth Social came not long after it sought a response to a claim that Pompeo was seeking the post of defence secretary but was being opposed by Trump’s son Donald Jr and the right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who served as a surrogate for Trump in his campaign.
Pompeo is said to have considered running for the presidency this year and endorsed Trump later than some of his supporters.
“There is a desire to not have people with presidential ambitions” using a cabinet role as a launchpad, an official in the first Trump administration told the website. “He got burnt by Mike previously, and by Haley, and his foreign policy views are not aligned with the president.”
Mike Davis, a lawyer and Trump adviser suggested in a post on X that he was fielding requests from other jobseekers hoping for a role in the next administration.
A staunch loyalist, Elise Stefanik, a New York congresswoman, has been offered the job as US ambassador to the United Nations.
The scale of Trump’s victory in the electoral college rose over the weekend, as the Associated Press declared that he had won Arizona, which Biden narrowly carried in 2020. The call confirmed that Trump had won all seven swing states and gained 312 electoral votes; 270 are required to win the White House.
The Republican senator John Barrasso, of Wyoming, said Trump had won a mandate on immigration and on attempting to tackle inflation.
The American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration Washington think tank, has estimated the cost of a one-time mass-deportation operation at $315 billion, not including “the incalculable additional costs necessary to acquire the institutional capacity to remove over 13 million people in a short period of time”.
It said no previous deportation programme had ever managed more than half a million people in a year. “There would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step.” It noted that “the entire US prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people”.
Homan dismissed suggestions that millions of people would be held in concentration camps. But he told The Sunday Times that newly built detention centres would hold those due to be deported and that the US military could play a greater role in transporting them.
“We’re going to concentrate on the worst of the worst,” he said. “It’s going to be a lot different to what the liberal media is saying it’s going to be.”
In an interview with Time magazine in April, Trump referred to Eisenhower’s “mass deportation of people” and envisioned using the National Guard and possibly other elements of the military as well. “I will be complying with court orders,” he said. “And I’ll be doing everything on a very legal basis.”
He added: “I have great respect for the Supreme Court.”
Trump helped to reshape the court during his first term, making appointments that gave conservative justices a 6-3 majority. Following his election victory last week, Democrats are said to be agonising over whether they could swiftly replace Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal justice who is 70 and has type one diabetes, before Republicans take control of the Senate in January. There are doubts, however, over whether a new nominee could be confirmed in time.
