Trump border czar defends school, church raids
‘There’s consequences of entering the country illegally. If we don’t show there’s consequences, you’re never going to fix the border problem’
‘There’s consequences of entering the country illegally. If we don’t show there’s consequences, you’re never going to fix the border problem’
US President Donald Trump’s border czar on Sunday defended raiding churches and schools as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration, while six federal agencies launched a sweep aimed at “potentially dangerous criminal aliens” in Chicago.
Trump began his second term last Monday with a flurry of executive actions aimed at overhauling US immigration.
His administration quickly moved to ramp up deportations, including by relaxing rules governing enforcement actions at “sensitive” locations such as schools, churches and workplaces.
Asked about the rule change, Tom Homan, who was tapped to oversee Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda, said Sunday it sends a clear message.
“There’s consequences of entering the country illegally. If we don’t show there’s consequences, you’re never going to fix the border problem,” Homan, who is also the former head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told ABC News’ “This Week” program.
But Trump has been unhappy with the number of arrests so far and has directed federal immigration officials to meet higher detention quotas, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
It said he was ordering ICE to raise the arrest numbers from a few hundred a day to at least 1,200 to 1,500, citing people with knowledge of internal briefings.
ICE reported making a total of 593 arrests on Friday and 286 arrests on Saturday. In the 2024 federal fiscal year, it averaged around 310 per day, according to agency data.
Homan was speaking from Chicago, a Democratic stronghold and a so-called “sanctuary city” for migrants that Homan has viewed as “ground zero” of the deportation push.
ICE announced Sunday on X that it had joined five other federal agencies in “enhanced targeted operations” in Chicago “to enforce US immigration law and preserve public safety and national security by keeping potentially dangerous criminal aliens out of our communities.”
