Tom Homan, former acting director of ICE, will lead border enforcement efforts under the new Trump administration, according to an announcement from President-Elect Donald Trump on Sunday night.
Trump says Homan will oversee the borders as well as maritime and aviation security as the "border czar."
Border czar is an unofficial title that doesn’t require Senate approval — unlike the heads of ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
Trump says Homan will also be in charge of carrying out deportations — during his campaign, Trump repeatedly promised that as president he’d deport roughly 11 million longtime U.S. residents who are undocumented.
The plan would impact 1 in 12 people nationwide, either through deportation itself or separation from undocumented family members, according to data analyzed by the advocacy group FWD.us.
In an interview with "60 Minutes" before the election, Homan also said mixed immigration families could avoid getting separated by choosing to be deported together. The scheme could cost some $88 billion a year, according to the American Immigration Council.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway says Trump would likely need to rely on local police to help with deportations.
“That creates another problem, if there may be some sheriffs, some police chiefs, that go along with that, that may believe the fear rhetoric about migrants,” he said.
Proposition 314 — the ballot initiative Arizona voters passed this month — calls for state and local police to carry out immigration-related arrests.
Hathaway says his deputies don’t have the training or resources to carry out that kind of enforcement. He’s also worried doing so would open his department up to racial profiling lawsuits, and sow fear and distrust among community members in Nogales and elsewhere in the largely Latino border county.
Provisions within the measure are also on hold while a lawsuit against a similar law in Texas moves forward.
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In a weeklong series, KJZZ looks at Arizona’s connection to the Japanese internment policies that were instituted following Pearl Harbor, and how it ties into the broader story of racialized public policy. Gabriel Pietrorazio joined The Show for a closer look at the series. -
That includes more than 11,000 non-Mexican deportees, according to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. -
The Pinal County Attorney’s Office announced this week that it’s joining certain violent-crime task forces led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The same deal with the Phoenix Police Department was canceled more than a decade ago. -
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security have accused Arizona Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva of “faking outrage” over her protest at an ICE raid west of downtown Tucson last week. -
Long before World War II, the U.S. Army rounded up Native Americans onto reservations — drawing in their new boundaries. And in Arizona, the federal government once again looked to those lands for another minority population — Japanese Americans — also forcibly rounded up by the military after the Pearl Harbor bombing in 1941.
