The more we see of President-elect Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom “The Hammer” Homan, the better he looks.
Our southern border in particular has been an oozing sore for four years now. There’s a lot of cleaning up that needs to be done, and Homan seems the guy to do it.
Another illustration of his suitability surfaced Friday, when the border czar gave an interview to NBC News detailing some of his plans.
Homan said at the U.S. southern border:
Donald Trump’s administration [will] shut down the Darien Gap, the dangerous Panamanian jungle hundreds of thousands of migrants cross each year on their way north.
Further:
It needs to happen. Shutting down the Darien Gap is going to protect our national security. It’s going to save thousands of lives.
That is an interesting tactical idea; we can cut down on a fair amount of the Latin American influx at a serious geographic choke point.
Oh, yes, some will get around it, with improvised watercraft if nothing else—but that’s only one step of many towards getting control of our illegal immigration problem.
The Hammer has more ideas.
Using the military, though—that’s a more complicated issue, as we can’t simply deploy the 82nd Airborne into a foreign country.
But President Trump has shown himself to be very good at applying pressure on other national leaders. It will be interesting to see what pressure he applies to Columbia and Panama to get them to clamp down on these crossings.
Homan, acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration and a former ICE agent himself, also acknowledged that Trump’s mass deportation plan would include ‘collateral arrests’—undocumented [aliens] without criminal records who are discovered [while] ICE agents search for their targets.
Homan warned that workplace roundups would ramp up again soon after Trump takes office.
He said:
We’re going to do it in a smart way. We’re still working on how exactly we want to roll this out, but [work site] operations have to come back again because it’s the No. 1 place we find victims of forced labor being run by many cartels.
One of the major draws for illegal aliens, of course, is the chance of employment.
That is another major hole that needs to be fixed. There’s a legislative fix, or perhaps several.
People who employ illegal [aliens] are aggravating the problem, and need to be addressed as part of the problem.
Final thought: I love when a plan comes together. Soon…
