On Saturday, former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Tom Homan appeared on “Fox & Friends: Weekend” with host Griff Jenkins.
During the segment, Jenkins asked Homan about the Trump administration’s plans to allow Border Patrol agents to travel to sanctuary cities in order to capture illegal immigrants.
Homan praised the policy, saying that Trump is “absolutely right,” and that he himself asked Congress to do something about the issue for years, but they didn’t, and they won’t because “they want it to be a 2020 issue.”
Homan added that when “California passed their sanctuary law,” and he was the head of ICE, he “sent a lot of additional agents out to California,” which he claims the state saw as “retaliation.”
It wasn’t retaliation. When you take an agent of the jail, an agent that can process ten illegal aliens during a shift, and you choose to kick the officer out of the jail, then release those ten illegal aliens, it takes a whole fusion of operations teams to find this person on his turf, [who has] access to who knows what weapons … cover the backdoor, cover the front door, make an entry team. So, it takes a hell of a lot more agents.
“I’m glad the President’s doing this,” Homan said. “This is a great idea. This will help arrest those who are public safety threats and take them off our streets.”
Jenkins asked Homan if Trump’s new policy will “send a message south of the border,” to which Homan replied, “Absolutely.”
It’s going to send a strong message that, look, this country is not open to illegal immigration. If you’re lucky enough to get by the Border Patrol, you’re not home free no matter what the Democrat leadership wants to say. You can go to a so-called sanctuary city. There’s no sanctuary. ICE is not going to allow sanctuary; neither is the Border Patrol.
Switching gears, Jenkins then played Homan a clip of former Vice President Joe Biden speaking with journalist Jorge Ramos, claiming that illegal immigration isn’t a “burden,” but “a gift.”
Homan reacted, saying that Biden has “lost his mind because illegal immigration is not a gift.”
Legal immigration is … that’s why the President wrote a plan to base immigration on merit where those people can assimilate, help us grow this country and this economy. Illegal immigration is far from a gift. 31% of women being raped is not a gift. Children dying on the border is not a gift. Me, [standing at the] back of a tractor trailer with 19 dead immigrants at my feet was not a gift. Driving down American wages is not a gift. Taxing our schools and our hospitals is not a gift.
Homan then noted that when he worked under the Obama/Biden administration, he was given the Presidential Rank Award. “I don’t know what he’s doing other than pandering. It’s just a ridiculous statement to make.”
According to the official ICE website, Homan was given the award in part because he “marshalled efforts to handle the surge of unaccompanied children and family units from Central America who illegally entered the United States from across the Texas Rio Grande Valley,” and “he spearheaded the management and reform of the largest civil detention system in the nation.”
During his State of the Union speech on February 4, President Trump urged Congress to pass Sen. Thom Tillis’ (R-NC) legislation, which would allow people to sue sanctuary cities “when a loved one is hurt or killed as a result of these deadly practices.”
S. 2059 reads in part:
Any individual, or a spouse, parent, or child of such individual (if the individual is deceased or permanently incapacitated), who is the victim of a murder, rape, or any felony (as defined by the State) for which an alien (as defined in section 101(a)(3) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(3)) has been arrested, convicted, or sentenced to a term of imprisonment of at least 1 year, may bring an action for compensatory damages against a State or a political subdivision of a State in the appropriate Federal or State court if the State or political subdivision failed to comply with—
(A) a request with respect to an alien that was lawfully made by the Department of Homeland Security under section 236 or 287 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1226 and 1357); and
(B) a detainer for, or notify about the release of, the alien.
The following is a portion of the president’s SOTU speech pertaining to illegal immigration:
In sanctuary cities, local officials order police to release dangerous criminal aliens to prey upon the public, instead of handing them over to ICE to be safely removed.
Just 29 days ago, a criminal alien freed by the sanctuary city of New York was charged with the brutal rape and murder of a 92-year-old woman. The killer had been previously arrested for assault, but under New York’s sanctuary policies, he was set free. If the city had honored ICE’s detainer request, his victim would still be alive today.
The state of California passed an outrageous law declaring their whole state to be a sanctuary for criminal illegal immigrants – a very terrible sanctuary – with catastrophic results…
Senator Thom Tillis has introduced legislation to allow Americans like Jody to sue sanctuary cities and states when a loved one is hurt or killed as a result of these deadly practices.
I ask Congress to pass the Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act immediately. The United States of America should be a sanctuary for law-abiding Americans, not criminal aliens.
In the last three years, ICE has arrested over 5,000 wicked human traffickers. And I have signed nine pieces of legislation to stamp out the menace of human trafficking, domestically and all around the globe. My administration has undertaken an unprecedented effort to secure the southern border of the United States.