California national guard troops keep watch, as protests against immigration sweeps continue, in Los Angeles, California, on Monday. Photograph: Daniel Cole/Reuters
As many demand the release of loved ones, Trump’s ‘border czar’ admits some were arrested without criminal records
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that 118 immigrants were arrested this week, and released the names of some of those in its custody, alleging criminal violations. But the administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, also admitted that the agency was arresting people without criminal records.
The raids at workplaces – pushed by Homan and by White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller – come amid a broader push to speed up arrests and deportations. Homan said the LA area is likely to see more enforcement this week, even as thousands of national guard deployed to the city prepared to quell protests against the raids.
Lawyers from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), found that immigrants apprehended in LA were initially detained in the basement of a federal immigration building. “As attorneys, we are disgusted by DHS’s blatant betrayal of basic human dignity as we witness hundreds of people held in deplorable conditions without food, water, or beds for 12-plus hours,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, president of ImmDef. “This is an urgent moment for our country to wake up to the terror Ice is inflicting on communities and take action.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) held a rally in downtown Los Angeles demanding the “humane treatment and access to lawyers for all detainees”.
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The workplace raids were especially brazen, lawyers said, after a federal judge in April issued a preliminary injunction forbidding warrantless immigration stops. The injunction applied to a wide swath of California, and came after CBP conducted similar raids in California’s agricultural Kern county in January.
“You can’t just racially and ethnically profile people and arrest them and ask questions later,” said Reyes Savalza, noting that many of those arrested had no criminal history and could apply for various forms of immigration relief if they were allowed to contact attorneys.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Incoming White House ‘border czar’ Tom Homan speaks during Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 22, 2024. (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
“Decent people all over the world will hate this country… and they should,” said one critic.
Adding to alarm over U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration plans, his “border czar” told The Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that the administration plans to return to detaining migrant families with children.
Tom Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, said that ICE “will look to hold parents with children in ‘soft-sided’ tent structures similar to those used by U.S. border officials to handle immigration surges,” the Post summarized. “The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children, he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit together or be split up.”
Since Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris last month, migrant rights advocates have reiterated concerns about the Republican’s first-term policies—such as forced separation of families—and his 2024 campaign pledges, from mass deportations to attempting to end birthright citizenship, despite the guarantees of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Homan—who oversaw the so-called “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of migrant kids from their parents—said: “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.”
Incoming "border czar" Tom Homan on shipping U.S.-born children out of the country with their undocumented parents: “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child.”"Chose"? That's an odd word choice. The right wants to force women to give birth, not give them a choice.
Harris and President Joe Biden have come under fire for various immigration policies, but their administration did stop family detention—and when it was reported last year that the White House was weighing a revival of the practice, 383 groups urged the president to keep the pledge he made when he took office “to pursue just, compassionate, and humane immigration policies.”
Under Biden, the government ended mass worksite immigration raids and—eventually—the “Remain in Mexico” policy that stopped asylum-seekers from entering the United States. Homan told the Post that the next Trump administration should bring them back.
Less than a month before Trump’s inauguration, Biden is now facing pressure to “use the power of the pen to protect those seeking sanctuary from the coming deportation machine that will crush the human rights of our immigrant neighbors and those who have dreams of finding refuge here,” as Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O’Brien put it earlier this month.
The Post reported that “of all the border hard-liners in the incoming administration, Homan is perhaps the most cognizant of the limits of the government’s ability to deliver on promises of mass deportation—and the potential for a political backlash.”
Those hard-liners include dog-killing Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security; family separation architect Stephen Miller, the president-elect’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff for policy; and Caleb Vitello, the next acting ICE director whom Miller previously tried to install at the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” Homan told the newspaper. However, he also said: “We need to show the American people we can do this and not be inhumane about it… We can’t lose the faith of the American people.”
Critics of the next administration have suggested that—although Trump won the Electoral College and the popular vote last month—pursuing the GOP immigration policies, including “concentration camps” for migrant families, will anger the public.
Maximum cruelty is the goal https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2024/12/26/immigration-border-tom-homan-trump/
“Decent people all over the world will hate this country… and they should,” media columnist and Brooklyn College professor Eric Alterman said on social media in response to the Post‘s reporting.
Author and New York University adjunct associate professor Helio Fred Garcia said: “Trump’s next border czar previews performative cruelty. In the first term it included kidnapping of children from their parents and returning the parents to their home countries, with no record of which kids came from which parents. A crime against humanity.”
Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney who has argued many major immigration cases, told the Post that “the incoming administration has refused to acknowledge the horrific damage it did to families and little children the first time around and seems determined to once again target families for gratuitous suffering.”
“The public may have voted in the abstract for mass deportations,” he added, referring to the November election, “but I don’t think they voted for more family separation or unnecessary cruelty to children.”
