The more we see of President-elect Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom “The Hammer” Homan, the better he looks. Our southern border in particular has been an oozing sore for, well, four years now. There’s a lot of cleaning up that needs doing, and he seems the guy to do it.
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Another illustration of his suitability surfaced Friday, when the border czar gave an interview to NBC News detailing some of his plans.
Donald Trump’s administration would shut down the Darien Gap, the dangerous Panamanian jungle hundreds of thousands of migrants cross each year on their way north, incoming border czar Tom Homan said Thursday in a one-on-one interview at the U.S. southern border.
“It needs to happen,” he said. “Shutting down the Darien Gap is going to protect our national security. It’s going to save thousands of lives.”
That’s an interesting tactical idea; we can cut down on a fair amount of the Latin American influx at a serious geographic choke point. Oh, yes, some will get around it, with improvised watercraft if nothing else – but that’s only one step of many towards getting control of our illegal immigration problem. The Hammer has more ideas. Using the military, though — that’s a more complicated issue, as we can’t simply deploy the 82nd Airborne into a foreign country. But President Trump has shown himself pretty good at applying pressure on other national leaders. It will be interesting to see what pressure he applies to Columbia and Panama to get them to clamp down on these crossings.
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Homan, acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration and a former ICE agent himself, also acknowledged that Trump’s mass deportation plan would include “collateral arrests” — undocumented immigrants without criminal records who are discovered as ICE agents search for their targets.
Homan warned that workplace roundups would ramp up again soon after Trump takes office.
“We’re going to do it in a smart way,” he said. “We’re still working on how exactly we want to roll this out, but [work site] operations have to come back again because it’s the No. 1 place we find victims of forced labor being run by many cartels.”
One of the major draws for illegal immigrants, of course, is the chance of employment. That’s another major hole that needs to be fixed. There’s a legislative fix, or perhaps several. People who employ illegal immigrants are aggravating the problem, and need to be addressed as part of the problem.
See Related: Border Czar Tom Homan Issues Ominous Warning As Team Trump Prepares to Secure the Border
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The new border czar is, unmistakably, a guy who has his mind clearly on what he wants to do and how he intends to do it.
Tom Homan ended the interview thusly:
“I think the American people have spoken,” he said. “This is the No. 1 issue. They went to the voting booth. I think Congress is paying attention. They’ll give us the money to do this job. It’s not so much about illegal immigration. It’s about national security.”
His message to anyone in the U.S. illegally?
“Go home.”
Or, be sent home. That seems to be the range of options. That’s how laws are supposed to work.
