White House border czar Tom Homan said Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s mass deportation has begun as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers can now arrest illegal immigrants in churches and schools.
Fox News reported Tuesday morning that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security rescinded a 2021 policy from President Joe Biden’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that limited ICE enforcement in ‘sensitive’ areas.
Those areas were outlined as churches, schools and hospitals, among others.
The day No. 1 Trump order recommended that ICE officers simply use ‘common sense.’
Homan confirmed Tuesday afternoon that deportations are happening but didn’t divulge details to CNN’s Dana Bash.
‘As I’ve said numerous times, we’re concentrating on public safety threats. That will be our priority out of the gate,’ Homan said. ‘So ICE officers are back to doing their job.’
Bash pushed Homan on where these enforcement actions were happening and asked if they were ‘raids.’
‘I wouldn’t call them raids,’ he answered. ‘They’re targeted enforcement operations. They know exactly who they’re looking for, they know pretty much where they’ll find them.’
Homan said the ‘target of this operation’ is illegal immigrants who have a criminal record.
But the border czar then outlined how sanctuary cities won’t even allow ICE officials to take illegal immigrants from jails, which will force officers into immigrant communities.
‘When you release a public safety threat out of a sanctuary jail and they won’t give us access to him, that means we got to go to the neighborhood and find him, and we will find him, but when we find him, he may be with others,’ he predicted.
‘There’s nothing in the INA – Immigration and Nationality Act – says you’ve got to be convicted of a serious crime in order to be removed from this country,’ Homan explained.
‘So there could be more collateral arrests in sanctuary cities because they forced us to go into the community and find the guy we’re looking for,’ he continued.
Bash asked if spouses of American citizens could be swept up in this immigration enforcement push.
Homan didn’t answer that question directly.
‘What I’m telling you is when we go find our priority target, which is a criminal alien, if he’s with others in the United States illegally, we’re going to take enforcement action against them,’ the border czar said.
‘And this is the difference between the last administration and this administration,’ he said. ‘ICE is going to enforce the immigration law.’
American voters rewarded Trump with a second term in part due to his hardline approach on immigration, as in influx in migrants flooded over the southern border after President Joe Biden took office as the COVID-19 pandemic improved.
Trump has said he wants to accomplish the single largest mass deportaion in American history.
He tapped Homan, his acting ICE director for the first year and a half of the Trump administration, to lead the charge.
Homan was one of the proponents of separating border crossers’ children from the parents, a policy that received widespread criticism from the political left.
Trump also tapped Stephen Miller, the author of the policy, to be one of his top White House advisers this time around.