Riding high off two recent widely denounced deportations that ripped apart immigrant families who have called the U.S. home for decades, acting ICE director Thomas Homan boasted at a conference on Wednesday that he has really begun “enjoying” his role in carrying out President Donald Trump’s racist mass deportation agenda.
“This isn’t a job I particularly wanted in the beginning,” Homan said at a so-called “Border Security Expo” in San Antonio, Texas. “But I’ll tell you what, I’m enjoying it.”
Homan on sanctuary cities. If ICE agents can’t get in local jails, they’ll do street or home arrests instead. “Guess what, we’ll find others,” says. “We’ll more than likely find others who weren’t even on my radar. And now they’re going to get arrested.”
— Roque Planas (@RoqPlanas) January 31, 2018
This is hardly the first time Homan has openly relished in his ability to instill fear in immigrant communities. At a hearing on Capitol Hill last June, Homan said undocumented immigrants “should be uncomfortable” and constantly “looking over their shoulder[s].”
During his appearance at the “Border Security Expo” on Wednesday—which came just hours after Trump ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric with a flurry of lies during his State of the Union address—Homan also expressed his opposition to a clean DACA solution supported by immigrant rights advocates, spoke in favor of Trump’s “wall,” and bragged about how many immigrants his agency has deported since Trump took office.
“If we get a clean DACA bill, shame on all of us,” Homan said.
“The wall is a necessary tool. We need it.” – Homan
— Sydney Greene (@thesydneygreene) January 31, 2018
Reacting to Homan’s comments on Thursday, immigrant rights activist Tony Choi wrote, “There’s a special place in hell for those who get off on broken families and profit off of incarcerating innocent people.”
“Homan is the proof that our immigration system isn’t broken; it’s fundamentally designed to break us,” Choi added on Twitter.
