Gabe Gutierrez, Julia Ainsley, Olympia Sonnier and Laura Strickler
Donald Trump gave a special shout-out during his remarks in Grand Rapids, Mich., this week, saying he wanted to “pay tribute” to a person he very much respected.
Trump thanked Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his administration who has since been a frequent commentator on Fox News.
Former President Donald Trump has not yet outlined whether he would pursue another "zero tolerance" policy in a second term.Paul Sancya / AP
April 4, 2024, 6:21 PM +03
By Gabe Gutierrez, Julia Ainsley, Olympia Sonnier and Laura Strickler
Donald Trump gave a special shout-out during his remarks in Grand Rapids, Mich., this week, saying he wanted to “pay tribute” to a person he very much respected.
Trump thanked Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his administration who has since been a frequent commentator on Fox News.
“He is some man,” Trump said, adding, “He has been so great on television. He’s been so respectful of the job that we did as an administration.”
Homan was an early proponent of the administration’s controversial “zero tolerance” policy, which resulted in at least 5,500 families being separated at the southern border in 2018 before Trump himself signed an executive order ending the practice after intense backlash from human rights groups. Homan now heads up Border911, a nonprofit group that warns of the supposed threat posed by undocumented immigrants.
On Thursday, the former president is set to see him again at a Mar-a-Lago gala hosted by Border911. According to a flyer promoting the event, the gathering will also include Matt Whitaker — who served as chief of staff at the Department of Justice when it implemented “zero tolerance.” Later, when Whitaker testified before Congress as acting attorney general, he conceded there was no plan to reunite families.
Trump’s open-armed association with the group — and his intensifying focus on migrants and crime on the campaign trail — provide one of the clearest windows yet into a potential second term and the hard-liners he might appoint to the Department of Homeland Security to enforce immigration laws.
In campaign rallies and interviews with Newsmax and Fox News, Trump has said he’d put Homan and others back into a potential second administration “to have great border security.”
According to the invitation, another expected attendee Thursday night is Rodney Scott, who served as Border Patrol chief during Trump’s last year in office and has defended “zero tolerance” by arguing that it was effective in slowing down migration. As NBC News previously reported, Scott explored the idea of placing buoys in the Rio Grande to deter migrants years before Texas actually did it.
Trump has laid out an aggressive immigration platform for a second term: mass deportations; restoring all the border policies of his first term; deploying all necessary military assets, including the U.S. Navy, to impose a full naval embargo on drug cartels; ordering the Department of Defense to use special forces, cyber warfare and other covert and overt actions to dismantle cartel leadership and infrastructure; designating the major drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations; and asking Congress to ensure drug smugglers and traffickers can receive the death penalty.
His campaign has also said Trump would sign an executive order on his first day in office “to stop federal agencies from granting automatic U.S. citizenship to the children of illegal aliens” and to stop “birth tourism.” He’d also prioritize blocking federal grants to so-called “sanctuary cities.”
One policy Trump has not promised is a return to “zero tolerance” or family separations. To date, hundreds — and possibly more than 1,000 — families separated under zero tolerance remain separated, according to Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney for the ACLU representing the separated families in a class action lawsuit. The policy separated families who crossed the border together and federally prosecuted parents, while sending children to the care of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Still, Trump has declined to take a clear stance on the issue. When asked whether he’d reinstate the policy during a CNN town hall in May, he didn’t answer directly.
“When you have that policy, people don’t come,” he said. “If a family hears that they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.”
When pressed whether that meant he would reinstate the policy, Trump said: “No. When you say to a family that if you come, we’re going to break you up, they don’t come. And we can’t afford to have any more.”
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