Donald Trump’s incoming border czar says the administration’s plans for a mass deportation operation will include jailing immigrant families together in detention centers before they are removed from the country.
“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” Tom Homan told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”
Trump’s pledge to arrest, detain and deport people living in the country without legal permission as part of his “day one” agenda would deploy federal, state and local law enforcement into immigrant communities across the nation.
Trump and Homan have repeatedly said that even U.S. citizen children of non-citizen parents are expected to be deported along with their families.
“Here’s the issue,” Homan told The Post. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”
More than 16.7 million people share a home with at least one family member who is undocumented, and roughly six million of those people are children under the age of 18, according to the American Immigration Council.
President Joe Biden ended the practice of family detention in 2021 and closed three Immigration and Customs Enforcement “residential centers” that housed roughly 3,000 beds. Minors held in family detention centers for 20 days must be released, according to the federal judge overseeing immigration detention programs involving children.
ICE has largely focused deportation programs around adults, but Homan said that is expected to change under Trump, and the administration will be exploring how to hold families with children in tent-like structures.
Homan served as acting director of ICE during Trump’s first term, implementing the so-called “zero tolerance” immigration policy that separated more than 4,000 children from their families as soon as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border
He says it will be up to parents who are being deported whether to take their citizen children with them.
“I’m not looking to separate families at all. That’s not my goal,” Homan told Republican supporters in Chicago earlier this month. “My goal is to enforce the law, but if you put yourself in that position, it may happen. But there’s no plan in this administration right now to separate families. It just isn’t. However, we’re going to enforce the law. So if you put yourself in that position, it’s on you.”
Trump has called on the National Guard to support federal, state and local law enforcement for the administration’s deportation program, but troops won’t be making arrests, according to Homan.
“I don’t see this thing as being sweeps and the military going through neighborhoods,” he told The Washington Post.
Immigration arrests will be “targeted” at people with criminal records, he said.
But ICE “already goes after people with criminal records, all the time,” which has been a priority of the last several presidential administrations, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
“The overwhelming majority of people who would be the targets of a mass deportation campaign do not have criminal records,” he told members of Congress this month. “They are people who have been living otherwise law-abiding lives, living, working, and in many cases, paying taxes.”
Conservative estimated costs of launching such an operation over an 11-year period would cost at least $1 trillion, according to Reichlin-Melnick.
ICE is separately considering proposals to expand its immigration detention capacity in at least six states, according to records obtained by the ACLU through a lawsuit. Private prison companies — as well as other corporate entities that support the construction of facilities and monitor and staff them — have recently submitted proposals for government contracts.
“You cannot have mass deportations without a significant expansion of ICE detention capacity in states across the country and that’s exactly what the incoming Trump administration is preparing to do,” ACLU National Prison Project senior staff attorney Eunice Cho said in a statement.
“Rather than permanently shutting down abusive detention facilities, the Biden administration is paving the way for President-elect Donald Trump to make good on his cruel and inhumane mass deportation proposals,” she added.
