(The Hill) – Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan said Monday that President-elect Trump’s administration will crank up workplace raids as part of its broader immigration crackdown.
Speaking on “Fox & Friends,” the former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said workplace raids would address labor and sex trafficking.
“Where do we find most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking? At worksites,” Homan told Steve Doocy.
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But advocates say that approach is unlikely to help combat trafficking.
“He’s conflating the traffickers with the people being trafficked,” said Heidi Altman, director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center.
“Tom Homan is skilled at using public safety rhetoric to justify vicious tactics that tear families apart.”
Homan, an early proponent of the “zero tolerance” policy that separated more than 4,000 children from their parents in the first Trump administration, said he will prioritize “public safety threats and national security threats” for deportation as border czar.
But Homan said foreign nationals with orders of deportation “became a fugitive,” suggesting immigrants without criminal records but with final orders of deportation would be high on the list of deportation priorities.
Homan told Doocy that the Biden administration “has lost over 300,000 children that were smuggled in this country by criminal cartels,” a reference to a debunked campaign claim voiced both by Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance regarding a report published by the Homeland Security Office of Inspector General in August.
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According to the report, 291,000 unaccompanied children had not received a notice to appear in court as of May 2024, and a further 32,000 received a notice but did not appear.
Those figures related to nearly 450,000 unaccompanied children released by ICE to the Department of Health and Human Services between October 2018 and September 2023, meaning a number of them were released by the first Trump administration.
“This is not a ‘missing kids’ problem; it’s a ‘missing paperwork’ problem,” Jonathan Beier, associate director of research and evaluation for the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program, told The Associated Press in October.
