President-elect Donald Trump’s handpicked “border czar” Tom Homan said in an interview Saturday that the incoming administration is reconsidering whether to launch immigration raids in Chicago next week after preliminary details leaked out in news reports.
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Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told The Washington Post that the new administration “hasn’t made a decision yet.”
“We’re looking at this leak and will make a decision based on this leak,” Homan said. “It’s unfortunate because anyone leaking law enforcement operations puts officers at greater risk.”
ICE has been planning a large operation in the Chicago area for next week that would start after Inauguration Day and would bring in additional officers to ramp up arrests, according to two current federal officials and a former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal law enforcement planning.
Homan said he did not know why Chicago “became a focus of attention” and said the incoming administration’s enforcement goals are much broader than one city.
“ICE will start arresting public safety threats and national security threats on day one,” he said. “We’ll be arresting people across the country, uninhibited by any prior administration guidelines. Why Chicago was mentioned specifically, I don’t know.”
“This is nationwide thing,” he added. “We’re not sweeping neighborhoods. We have a targeted enforcement plan.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents gather in Alexandria, Virginia, on October 4, 2022 prepare for a pre-dawn raid. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
The Washington Post
examined which groups of immigrants could be at higher risk of deportation under the second Trump administration, and what logistical and financial obstacles stand in the way.
End of carousel
The seesawing reports of possible raids in Chicago can stir up fears that advance the administration’s broader enforcement goals, even if operations are postponed or shifted to other cities. Homan and other Trump aides say they want immigrants living in the United States illegally to once more fear arrest and choose to leave the country on their own, or “self-deport.”
All administrations have made arresting criminals a top priority, and ICE officer teams typically develop target lists of immigrants who have disregarded deportation orders. Officers may also arrest other immigrants who cannot prove they have legal status, a tactic the agency refers to as “collateral arrests.” Biden largely banned such arrests in hopes that Congress would pass a law making undocumented immigrants eligible for citizenship.
Despite Homan’s protestations, he and other incoming Trump officials have said repeatedly that they are planning to immediately switch into enforcement mode, and that any of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States illegally could be a target.
The Wall Street Journal, which was
first to report on the possible raid, wrote that Homan said at a holiday party last month in Chicago that the administration would start raids “right here” and threatened to prosecute Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) for harboring undocumented immigrants if he got in the way.
Homan declined to confirm details about a possible deployment in Chicago and said operational plans are left up to regional ICE offices. It would be unusual for an administration to be involved in law enforcement planning operations before the presidential transition is complete, though Homan acknowledged he has engaged in some preliminary discussions about enforcement.
“We just told them: Put your boots on,” Homan said.
News of next week’s raids leaked after the Chicago City Council decisively rejected an effort to allow city police to cooperate with immigration enforcement. “We intend to stand by and protect Chicago’s immigrant communities against threats from ICE,” Johnson
said Wednesday after the vote.
In a television appearance on Friday, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked Homan if he was “blowing your cover” by asking him about a “big raid” planned for Chicago next week.
“Or do you want people to know?” Watters
mused. “Maybe they can self-deport?”
“There’s going to be a big raid all across the country. Chicago is just one of many places,” Homan said with a short laugh. “ICE is finally going to do their job. We’re going to take the handcuffs off of ICE and let them go arrest criminal aliens. That’s what’s going to happen.”
Homan was one of the
nation’s most strident critics against advertising immigration raids ahead of time under the Trump administration in 2018. He called the Oakland, California, mayor “reckless” and “irresponsible” for alerting city residents that ICE was planning a raid when he was the agency’s deputy director.
He noted then that after the report leaked, ICE made 150 arrests but were still missing 864 fugitives.
