President-elect Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan delivered alarming new logistical details of a forthcoming mass deportation effort, a day after promising to restart the first Trump administration policy of family separation.
In an interview with NewsNation, Homan, tapped by Trump to lead border security policy, admitted that millions of mixed-status households created a “difficult situation”
The Center for Migration Studies estimates that at least 4.7 million households in the U.S. are home to both documented and undocumented family members and that 5.5 million U.S.-born children live in homes with at least one undocumented person.
Homan ruled out the Trump-backed plan to retroactively repeal American-born children’s birthright citizenship but acknowledged that the children of undocumented parents may be put in dire positions.
“As far as U.S. children, that’s going to be a difficult situation because we’re not going to change your U.S. citizenship,” he told NewsNation host Ali Bradley. “Which means they’re going to be put in a halfway house or they can stay at home and wait for the officers to get the travel arrangements and come back and get the family.”
Homan added that the “best thing to do for a family is to self-deport themselves” rather than face separation and detention by authorities.
The “border czar” offered no details into what “halfway houses” for millions of American children would look like, but told Bradley that mass deportation has no “price tag.”
Trump and Homan’s mass removal plan could target nearly 20 million people and cost $315 billion, per an American Immigration Council estimate from October.
“I don’t put a price on national security. I don’t put a price on American lives… This operation would be expensive,” Homan said. “We need funding. We obviously need to buy more detention beds because everybody we arrest, we have to detain to work on those removal efforts.”
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