The White House border czar Tom Homan said in a press conference shared online Thursday that the Trump administration was not considering amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Homan, responding to a question about whether illegal immigrants under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy — also called Dreamers — would be deported when mass deportations resume, said, “If you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem,” according to a C-SPAN 3 video.
“Someone saying I made a comment about the discussions going on about amnesty. I said from day one, I’ll say it again … President Trump said amnesty is off the table. I support that. I don’t think amnesty should be on the table,” he added.
That the activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) no longer appear to dominate the headlines does not signify that the Trump administration has backtracked on its plan to deport illegal immigrants en masse, Homan said in an exclusive interview with CBS News Tuesday. “The numbers have dipped slightly, I think, 12%, because the government’s shut down,” he told the outlet.
He said the ICE operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota, were not perfect and he had to make corrections upon his deployment there by the administration. Those moves led to “unprecedented support from county jails across the state that we didn’t have before,” he added. (RELATED: Trump Admin Places Agents In Alex Pretti Shooting On Administrative Leave)
Homan went to Minnesota in January in the wake of the shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. He previously stated that he had meetings with various officials, including Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“We got the bad guy in the safety and security of the jail. Which means we didn’t have to go to the street to find him, right? So you send a whole team of six or seven guys to go find this person, and things were so elevated, the hate and the violence was so elevated. Now we got to send a security team to back up the jobs team,” he told the outlet.
Homan told FOX News Thursday that the administration was keen to deport every illegal alien, while prioritizing deportation for criminal illegal aliens, to “send a message to the whole world” that illegal immigration is criminal.
“About 60 percent of those we are arresting are criminals. 40 percent are non-criminals. I like that calculation! I think 60 criminal, 40 non-criminal is better than 40 criminal, 60 non-criminal,” he told the outlet.
He also pledged to send more agents to New York and slammed sanctuary cities as “dangerous.”