ICE chief says agents just getting started
Arrests in expanded priority groups ‘ close to perfect,’ he says
“Every crime an illegal alien commits wouldn’t have been committed if he wasn’t here.” Thomas Homan, acting ICE director
In the seven months since Thomas Homan was appointed to carry out President Trump’s promises to crack down on undocumented immigrants living in the U. S., he has been accused of abusing that power by targeting undocumented immigrants without criminal records.
So far, the data seems to back up those accusations, with the percentage of undocumented immigrants without a criminal record arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents increasing each month, from 18% in January to 30% in June.
But Homan, a 33- year law enforcement veteran who has worked along the southern border and is now the acting director of ICE, doesn’t shy away from those numbers. In fact, he said they’re only the start.
“You’re going to continue to see an increase in that,” Homan told USA TODAY during a visit to Miami this week.
Homan has become the public face of Trump’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, a central theme of his presidential campaign and one of the few areas where he has been able to make wholesale changes without any help from Congress.
Under President Obama, ICE agents were directed to focus their arrests on undocumented immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes, were members of gangs or posed a national security threat.
Trump and his Department of Homeland Security have vastly expanded that pool, ordering agents to focus on undocumented immigrants who have only been charged with crimes and allowing them to arrest any undocumented immigrant they happen to encounter.
ICE agents are also targeting undocumented immigrants who have been ordered removed from the country by a federal judge — a group the Obama administration largely left alone. And they’re targeting people who illegally entered the country more than once, which raises their actions to a felony.
Using that new metric, Homan said 95% of the 80,000 undocumented immigrants they’ve arrested so far fall under their newly- defined “priority” categories. “That’s pretty close to perfect execution of the policies,” Homan said. “The numbers speak for themselves.”
Homan was visiting Miami with Attorney General Jeff Sessions to publicly thank local leaders who changed their so- called “sanctuary” policies. That is a general term used to describe about 300 cities, counties, states and local law enforcement agencies that limit their cooperation with federal immigration efforts in various ways.
Sessions is threatening to withhold millions of dollars in federal law enforcement grants from those cities if they don’t change their policies. Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez was the first in the nation to give in to Trump’s demands, arguing that his county could not risk the $ 355 million in federal grants it receives each year.
“Thank you for your leadership, sir,” Homan said to Gimenez, a Cuban-American immigrant who is the mayor of a county where the majority of people are foreign- born.
But other major cities, including Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, argue the federal government cannot force them to carry out a federal function and that the Trump administration is asking them to employ practices that violate federal law. Leaders from those cities say it’s misguided for Washington to withhold desperately needed law enforcement dollars from cities such as Chicago that are facing surges in violent crime.
Homan sees it differently, saying that cities such as Chicago are putting his agents at risk because they can’t arrest undocumented immigrants in the safe confines of the city’s jails and are forced to conduct the dangerous work of arresting them in their homes or on the street.
“The way I see it, we’re not taking federal funding away from them, the mayor took it away from himself,” Homan said, referring to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
During his speech, Sessions frequently cited the surging murder rates in Chicago, which he deems a sanctuary city, with the plummeting murder rates in Miami, which he declared on Wednesday was no longer a sanctuary city. Sessions didn’t provide any evidence that undocumented immigrants were contributing to the murders in Chicago, but Homan said that question is irrelevant.
“The question is always asked, ‘ Do illegal immigrants commit more crimes than U. S. citizens?’ I don’t know,” Homan said. “But what I can say is every crime an illegal alien commits wouldn’t have been committed if he wasn’t here. That’s a preventable crime.”