(The Center Square) – Tom Homan, designated border czar by President Donald Trump, said decisions judges trying to stop the immigration enforcement efforts of the administration “aren’t going to stop us from making this country safe again.”
He also said that “a secure border saves lives” and that data backs up that assertion. He spoke on Thursday during an immigration roundtable hosted in Sarasota, Fla., by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The veteran law enforcement official and former Border Patrol agent said also that members of Congress that don’t “wake up” to the realities of enforcing the nation’s immigration laws need to leave office via the ballot box and that voters need to find replacements that will support border enforcement.
“The rule of law is what this country is about,” Homan said. “We’re the most welcoming country in the world. We take in more refugees than any country, but we’ve got to have the rule of law because people are dying. That’s why I fight as hard as I fight.
“Well, I found it remarkable that any district judge has the authority to overrule the president’s executive orders and what he basically wanted us to do is turn the planes around in mid-air full of terrorists and bring them back into the United States, which is ridiculous and we didn’t do it. Now we turn to litigation.”
Homan was discussing a class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this week trying to overturn Trump’s executive order that uses the Enemy Aliens Act to find, arrest and deport violent Venezuelan prison gang members from the transnational criminal organization Tren de Aragua.
The border czar was also joined by former acting Homeland Security director and America First Policy Institute Center for Homeland Security & Immigration Vice President Chad Wolf and New College of Florida President Richard Corcoran.
“The bottom line is we’re not going to stop doing what we’re doing,” Homan said. “We’re going to arrest aliens today. We’re going to arrest TDA today. We’re going to deport TDA today. We’re going to deport criminals every single day.”
He said since Trump took office in January, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested 40,000 people illegally in the country’s interior, with most of them being public safety and national security threats.
Homan also said that 400 people on the terrorist watch list crossed the southern border during President Joe Biden’s term, with only 16 coming across during Trump’s first term.
DeSantis signed on Feb. 13 what he terms the nation’s strongest state immigration enforcement law that created a State Board of Immigration Enforcement and made it a state crime for people to illegally enter Florida.
“Where were these District Court judges when all of these folks were coming into the United States, right?” DeSantis said. “The U.S. Supreme Court had a chance to nip all this in the bud about a month ago and they could have just been aggressive and put these district judges in their place.
“But the principle is, are we ruled by the consent of the governed under elections and under a written constitution or are we ruled by a district judge in D.C., Hawaii, wherever the hell they can shop for a judge to find somebody and then that trumps everything that is in the Constitution in terms of executive powers, because that’s what they’ll keep doing if you let that happen.”
DeSantis was also critical of the visa program that allows companies to import cheaper workers to replace native employees.
“It’s a way to just have dirt cheap labor and then export all the associated costs with that to the general public, rather than hire people legally,” DeSantis said of the H-1B visa program and “diversity lottery” for these cards.
Wolf said that in addition to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws on the border, reforms need to be made for the nation’s legal immigration system.
“The word I’d like to use with what the Trump administration has done in this first 50 days is velocity,” Wolf said. “The amount of action the Trump administration has done in these 50 or 60 days has been unprecedented. I hope that continues for the next three and a half years.
“I hope we don’t slow down because there is so much change that can be done, not only at the border, with removing individuals, but also on that legal side and really fix that because it is being abused as the governor said. There’s a lot to continue to be done on border security and immigration.”
