Tom Homan Gets Serious
Donald Trump’s border czar made it clear to sanctuary-city types that they’d best get out of his way.
It’s easy to see why Donald Trump likes Tom Homan.
Homan, Trump’s pick for border czar, is a serious man. He’s also a “How High?” guy — meaning that when you tell him to jump, he doesn’t ask you what the media or the lawyers or the Chamber of Commerce will think. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson once said, “My duty is to obey orders.” Homan is that guy, the guy who will unfailingly follow Trump’s orders for mass deportation of illegal immigrants.
Given this, it shouldn’t have caused anyone to reach for the smelling salts when Homan’s response to the intransigence of Denver’s leftist mayor, Mike Johnston, was to seek an odd common ground. When told that Johnston was “unafraid” of going to jail for “standing in the way” of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, Homan replied, “Me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing: He’s willing to go to jail. I’m willing to put him in jail.”
Incoming Border Czar Tom Homan:
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 26, 2024
“Me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing: He’s willing to go to jail. I’m willing to put him in jail.”
Let’s go!! pic.twitter.com/mnVOJwfesv
Johnston’s position, though, is even more extreme than that. Indeed, he recently fantasized about standing up to federal immigration officers: “More than us having [Denver police] stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there,” he told a Denver news website. “It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun, right? You’d have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. And you do not want to mess with them.”
Suffice it to say that any comparison of the Trump administration’s enforcement of our immigration laws to a bloody massacre of pro-democracy civilians by the Chinese Communist Party is sick indeed.
Not that Homan feels he needs it, but he also has the overwhelming support of the American people. According to a new CBS News poll conducted by YouGov, a whopping 73% of Americans think Trump should make mass deportation a priority of his administration, while a strong majority, 57%, believe that all illegal immigrants should be deported.
And consider the support among the border states and the border towns. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in Maverick County, Texas, by a whopping 77-21 margin. This time around, Trump won that same El Paso-area border county by a 59-41 margin. That’s a 74-point swing within an eight-year period. It’s the Joe Biden Effect.
These are stunning numbers, especially given that the mere construction of a southern border wall was a minority position during the four years of Trump’s administration.
Again, call it the Joe Biden Effect.
Times have changed. And so have the American people’s attitudes toward illegal immigration. But don’t tell that to the open-borders advocates at CBS News, who are running a PR campaign on behalf of those 20,000-or-so Haitians that the Biden administration dropped into the small town of Springfield, Ohio.
It’s unlikely, though, that Homan will be locking up the virtue-signaling mayors and governors of our nation’s so-called sanctuary cities and states. He has other incentives at his disposal — federal funding, for example. Fox News’s Mark Levin put this prospect to Homan over the weekend: “Tom Homan, you’ve got a very, very powerful weapon that the Democrats, when they’re in power, use against Republican administrations, state and local, all the time — federal funding. If you have a governor who says, ‘I’m not going to cooperate; I’m going to block you,’ well then federal funds should be slashed to that state, and I mean hugely so, so the people of that state understand that the governor is the responsible party, that the mayor is the responsible party.”
“And that’s going to happen,” Homan replied. “I guarantee you, President Trump will do that.”
Let’s hope so. We as a nation are in a bad way when defiance seems the norm and when the Rule of Law seems somehow outrageous. National Review’s Rich Lowry ponders this very question. “It is a symptom of how perverse the immigration debate has become,” he writes, “that it is treated as the norm to allow millions of people to defy our laws, but it’s a five-alarm fire if an incoming U.S. president vows to get serious about enforcing those same laws. If mass deportation is a hateful notion for Trump’s opponents, maybe the Biden administration shouldn’t have allowed a mass illegal influx.”
On Monday, Homan reiterated his resolve regarding the refusal of certain state and local governments to help remove the illegals in their midst: “They obviously hate President Trump more than they love their communities. So, look, I’ll say it again: Don’t cross the line. Do not impede us. Do not knowingly harbor or conceal an illegal alien, or there’s going to be consequences.”
POSTSCRIPT: Amid the hue and cry over Donald Trump’s deportation plans are these stubborn facts, as reported by Fox News: During his eight years in office, Barack Obama deported or otherwise removed 5.3 million illegals from within our nation, while Trump removed a more pedestrian 1.5 million illegals during his first term. Where was all this outrage when Obama was doing the deporting?
