WASHINGTON, D.C. (TIP): President-elect Donald Trump’s handpicked “border czar” Tom Homan said in an interview Saturday, January 18, that the incoming administration is reconsidering whether to launch immigration raids in Chicago next week after preliminary details leaked out in news reports, the Washington Post reports.
Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told The Washington Post that the new administration “hasn’t made a decision yet.”
“We’re looking at this leak and will make a decision based on this leak,” Homan said. “It’s unfortunate because anyone leaking law enforcement operations puts officers at greater risk.”
ICE has been planning a large operation in the Chicago area for next week that would start after Inauguration Day and would bring in additional officers to ramp up arrests, according to two current federal officials and a former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal law enforcement planning.
Homan said he did not know why Chicago “became a focus of attention” and said the incoming administration’s enforcement goals are much broader than one city.
“ICE will start arresting public safety threats and national security threats on day one,” he said. “We’ll be arresting people across the country, uninhibited by any prior administration guidelines. Why Chicago was mentioned specifically, I don’t know.”
“This is nationwide thing,” he added. “We’re not sweeping neighborhoods. We have a targeted enforcement plan.”
The seesawing reports of possible raids in Chicago can stir up fears that advance the administration’s broader enforcement goals, even if operations are postponed or shifted to other cities. Homan and other Trump aides say they want immigrants living in the United States illegally to once more fear arrest and choose to leave the country on their own, or “self-deport.”
All administrations have made arresting criminals a top priority, and ICE officer teams typically develop target lists of immigrants who have disregarded deportation orders. Officers may also arrest other immigrants who cannot prove they have legal status, a tactic the agency refers to as “collateral arrests.” Biden largely banned such arrests in hopes that Congress would pass a law-making undocumented immigrants eligible for citizenship.
Despite Homan’s protestations, he and other incoming Trump officials have said repeatedly that they are planning to immediately switch into enforcement mode, and that any of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States illegally could be a target.
The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report on the possible raid, wrote that Homan said at a holiday party last month in Chicago that the administration would start raids “right here” and threatened to prosecute Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) for harboring undocumented immigrants if he got in the way.
Homan declined to confirm details about a possible deployment in Chicago and said operational plans are left up to regional ICE offices. It would be unusual for an administration to be involved in law enforcement planning operations before the presidential transition is complete, though Homan acknowledged he has engaged in some preliminary discussions about enforcement.
“We just told them: Put your boots on,” Homan said.
News of next week’s raids leaked after the Chicago City Council decisively rejected an effort to allow city police to cooperate with immigration enforcement. “We intend to stand by and protect Chicago’s immigrant communities against threats from ICE,” Johnson said Wednesday after the vote. In a television appearance on Friday, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked Homan if he was “blowing your cover” by asking him about a “big raid” planned for Chicago next week.
“Or do you want people to know?” Watters mused. “Maybe they can self-deport?”
“There’s going to be a big raid all across the country. Chicago is just one of many places,” Homan said with a short laugh. “ICE is finally going to do their job. We’re going to take the handcuffs off of ICE and let them go arrest criminal aliens. That’s what’s going to happen.”
Homan was one of the nation’s most strident critics against advertising immigration raids ahead of time under the Trump administration in 2018. He called the Oakland, California, mayor “reckless” and “irresponsible” for alerting city residents that ICE was planning a raid when he was the agency’s deputy director. He noted then that after the report leaked, ICE made 150 arrests but were still missing 864 fugitives.
John Sandweg, an acting director for ICE during the Obama administration, said he was surprised to see discussion of the operations ahead of time.
“Historically this is something we kept very close wraps on for officer safety reasons,” he said, adding that fugitives “start hiding. It completely undermines the effectiveness of the operation by telegraphing that you’re coming.”
He said it is also unusual for ICE to start planning an operation before the new leadership is sworn in. Official policies remain under Biden’s control, and he has barred immigration agents from arresting people merely because they are undocumented, preferring to focus on serious offenders and recent border crossers.
“It’s incredibly unusual. This isn’t like policymaking or briefings, the normal stuff you see in transition,” Sandweg said. “This is an actual operational planning for an operation to take place on the first day of an administration. That’s weird.”
ICE typically arrests immigrants on civil immigration charges after local police have taken them into custody for a crime. Immigration officials prefer this approach because it gives them a better chance of finding possible threats to public safety, and because it is safer for an officer to arrest someone inside of a jail than out on the street.
Illinois is one of several states that fall under the supervision of ICE’s Chicago field office, and the state has passed laws severely restricting police cooperation with ICE.
Chicago City Council members Raymond Lopez and Silvana Tabares, both Democrats, sought to pass a measure Wednesday that would have allowed police to work with ICE to deport some criminals. Lopez did not respond to an interview request, but in a letter to the Chicago Tribune, he said that helping federal agents detain criminals could help protect other undocumented immigrants from harm. “Would it not keep thousands more safe from being collateral captures of the Trump administration?” he wrote. “I believe so. So does Homan. That is exactly what he stated to me when we met in December.”
Advocates in Chicago said rumors of raids began circulating on social media Wednesday. A Spanish-language post in WhatsApp groups warned that a “trusted source” had confirmed that ICE would be “patrolling” the city from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. on Inauguration Day and the next day to “detain people heading to work or home.”
“We wrestled with whether to share it,” said Eréndira Rendón, vice president of immigrant justice for the Resurrection Project, who noticed fewer people out shopping in her neighborhood after the rumors began. “We anticipated Chicago would be a target, but the message is the same: ‘You should be as prepared as possible.’”
(Source: Washington Post)
