Trump administration 'border czar' Tom Homan disclosed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested approximately 1,300 criminal migrants, speaking in a Thursday interview with NewsNation.
Homan revealed that 1,000 of the arrestees had criminal records for acts other than their violation of U.S. immigration law. Homan described the suspects as fugitives from the immigration court system. The operation was largely fixated in so-called 'sanctuary cities' such as San Francisco and New York City- jurisdictions which refuse to cooperate with the enforcement of federal law pertaining to illegal immigration.
“The other ones are either fugitives who’ve been through immigration court, that became a fugitive, or collaterals in sanctuary cities because they forced us in the community."
Homan revealed that ICE had secured the arrest of more than 3,000 criminal migrants nationwide, a figure including those arrested in the operations focusing on major cities. The border czar rebuffed entreaties from NewsNation host Chris Cuomo that the government focus exclusively on migrants arrested of additional violent crimes, pointing out that such an approach would leave outstanding federal immigration law essentially nullified.
“There’s nothing in the Immigration Nationality Act that says you got to be convicted of a crime. If you’re here illegally, you could be removed," Homan said of removal arrests.
“Our focus is on arresting public safety threats and national security threats. That’s exactly what we’re doing now.”
The cities of Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Newark, N.J were all targeted in the operation.
Homan called upon the Democrat-controlled jurisdictions to allow ICE officers to secure the criminal migrants detained in their jails- pointing to such a prospect as safer than extracting them from the streets.
“They’re not letting us in the county jail because of their sanctuary laws, but if we can arrest the bad guy in the safety and security of a jail — which is safer for the officer, safer for the aliens, safer for the community — then it’d be a lot less of the type of low-level offenders, and be a lot less arrested."
ICE is averaging a total of 433 arrests of criminal migrants a day- a significant increase from the 310 a day the agency averaged under President Joe Biden during the 2024 presidential election year. The daily average of criminal migrants would have to increase significantly to remove a large portion of the criminal migrants that infiltrated the nation's borders during Biden's tenure- a demographic estimated at roughly seven million people.
