SAN DIEGO (AP) — Donald Trump’s top choice for immigration policy jobs for the past four years has been focused on this moment.
Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan played pivotal roles in the first Trump administration and are unapologetic defenders of its policies, which included separating thousands of parents from their children at the border to deter illegal crossings. With Trump promising sweeping action on illegal immigration in a second term, the two White House advisers will bring useful knowledge, lessons from past setbacks and personal views to help him carry out his wishes.
After Trump left office in 2021, Miller became president of America First Legal, a group that joined Republican attorneys general to derail President Joe Biden’s border policies and plans. Homan, who has worked in immigration enforcement for decades, founded Border 911 Foundation Inc. founded a group that says it is fighting “a border invasion” and held its inaugural gala at Trump’s Florida estate in April.
Homan “knows how the machine works,” said Ronald Vitiello, former head of the Border Patrol and acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump. “He did it as a front line, he did it as a supervisor and he did it as a manager. He has nothing to learn on that side of the equation.”
Miller, he said, has deep knowledge, solid ideas about how the system should work and enjoys Trump’s trust.
Trump has promised to organize the largest deportation operation in American history. There are an estimated 11 million people in the country illegally. Questions remain about how people would be identified and where they would be held in a mass raid.
Miller and Homan portray illegal immigration as a black-and-white problem and applaud Trump’s policy of targeting anyone living in the country without deportation status.
Trump repeatedly and sharply attacked illegal immigration during his campaign, linking a record spike in unauthorized border crossings to problems ranging from drug trafficking to high housing prices. The arrival of asylum seekers and other migrants in cities and communities across the country has put pressure on some budgets and shifted the political debate on immigration largely to the right, with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris repeating some of her long-standing positions on immigration during her campaign. questioned immigration enforcement.
Miller, 39, is a former Capitol Hill staffer who rose to prominence as a fiery Trump speechwriter and key architect of his immigration policies from 2017 to 2021. He has long embraced doomsday predictions about how immigration threatens America, training his rhetoric on people. the world. to enter country illegally, but also advocates curbing legal immigration.
Trump, Miller said at the former president’s rally at Madison Square Garden last month, fought for “the right to live in a country where criminal gangs cannot simply cross our border and rape and murder with impunity.”
“America is only for Americans and Americans,” he added.
Homan, 63, chose a career in law enforcement as a boy in West Carthage, New York, where he watched his father work as a magistrate in the small farming town. After a year working as a police officer in his hometown, he joined the Border Patrol in San Diego and remembers thinking, “What the hell did I just do?”
Homan, then working in relative obscurity as a top ICE official, said in a 2018 interview with The Associated Press that he was given “a seat at the table” under President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, to deliberate on policy changes. told others that he was concerned that he might have been disrespectful and when the message got back to the secretary, Johnson told him: “I may not agree with what you say, but I need to know what the consequences will be if I don’t listen to you.”
Johnson said Monday he did not remember the exchange but did not dispute it and said it sounded like him.
Homan rose to acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump. He was “significantly involved” in separating children from their parents after they crossed the border illegally and parents faced criminal charges, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which successfully sued to ban the practice. to put a stop to it.
Under a court settlement, families cannot be separated until December 2031 as part of a policy to discourage illegal crossings. Trump has defended the practice, claiming without evidence last year that it “stopped people from gathering by the hundreds of thousands.”
At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington earlier this year, Homan said that while he believes the government should prioritize national security threats, “no one is off the table. If you are here illegally, you better look over your shoulder.”
In the 2018 interview, Homan said he had no reservations about the deportation of a man who had been living illegally in the United States for 12 years and with two children who are American citizens. He compared it to a ticket for speeding motorists or an audit for tax fraud.
“People think I’m enjoying this. I’m a father. People don’t think this bothers me. I feel bad about the plight of these people. Don’t get me wrong, but I have a job to do,” he said.
He defended the “zero tolerance” policy that led to family separations when Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged this during a hearing in Congress. He likened it to arresting someone for drunken driving with a young child as a passenger.
“When I was a police officer in New York and I arrested a father for domestic violence, I separated that father,” he said, provoking criticism that this was not the correct analogy. Children could not quickly be reunited with their parents at the border because government computers could not see that they were related. Many parents were deported while children were placed in shelters across the country.
Critics of zero tolerance have argued that separations that occur during criminal cases involving U.S. citizens are different from separations under “zero tolerance,” which in many cases saw parents deported without their children, who were sent to government-run facilities.
Miller and Homan do not need Senate approval, unlike the homeland security director, ICE director and commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol. These appointees will be charged with carrying out orders from the White House.
___
Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.
