Donald Trump’s administration will seek to expand the use of the US army to round up and deport undocumented migrants in “targeted operations” from day one of his presidency, according to the man tipped to lead the president-elect’s mass deportation programme.
Tom Homan, former head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term, said that he would spearhead a programme of unprecedented scope where every person who is in the US illegally — which he estimates to be about 20 million people — would be at risk of deportation.
“Bottom line: if you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table,” he said. “You’ve got to prioritise where you go first, but again, it’s a crime to enter this country illegally.
Homan told The Sunday Times that he would also move to completely shut down the US southern border, build a wall and restart Trump’s “remain in Mexico” programme, under which migrants waited across the border to have their asylum applications processed.
“People say, well, it sounds awful cruel, you want to remove millions,” he said. “Let me say this. You have a historic illegal immigration crisis where you have numbers we’ve never seen before, in the millions and millions, of illegal aliens released in this country [and] we know the vast majority will not get asylum, so they don’t qualify.” Times.
