Long before border czar Tom Homan took over in Minneapolis, he warned that a targeted approach to immigration enforcement would be needed to “keep the faith of the American people.”
Any immigrant in the U.S. illegally can be arrested and deported, but Homan, who has served as a Homeland Security official under the Obama and both Trump administrations, has long said immigrants who have committed additional crimes should be prioritized for arrest and deportation.
In an exclusive interview in June for the forthcoming book “Undue Process: The Inside Story of Trump’s Mass Deportation Program,” Homan warned that a failure to prioritize those arrests could cost the Trump administration support with the public.
“I think the vast majority of the American people think criminal illegal aliens need to leave. And if we stick to that prioritization, I think we keep the faith of the American people,” Homan said on June 16, as Border Patrol agents, under the direction of commander Greg Bovino, were conducting their first large-scale raids in Los Angeles.
“And I think the more we do that, the more the American people will support what President Trump’s doing. We got to do it and we’ve got to do it in a humane manner.”
At the time, Bovino had been brought up from relative obscurity as Border Patrol sector chief in El Centro, California, to run the agency’s Los Angeles operations. Unlike Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who set out to arrest a set of targets, Border Patrol began conducting sweeping arrests targeting immigrants based on where they lived and worked, according to court filings in a lawsuit.
Those broad enforcement actions, which began in the Los Angeles Fashion District on June 6, sparked five weeks of protests and led Trump to call in the National Guard and the Marines.
In one incident, dubbed Operation Trojan Horse, Bovino instructed his agents to pop out of a rental truck in a Home Depot parking lot to arrest day laborers awaiting work there.
Since then, Homeland Security’s enforcement tactics have come under increased scrutiny as deportation operations spread to Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans and beyond. Public outcry reached a crescendo last month when two U.S. citizens were shot to death by immigration authorities in Minneapolis.
When 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti and 37-year-old Renee Good were killed, Bovino had deployed a sweeping style of enforcement. Officers in Minneapolis detained a U.S. citizen and asked people at gas stations to prove their citizenship by showing their documentation.
His strong pushback on protesters — including personally deploying tear gas canisters into crowds in Chicago — was also met with sharp criticism and legal challenges.
Bovino was pulled from the job and replaced by Homan, who along with other leaders had advocated for a more targeted approach. Homan has said he would work on reducing the number of federal officers if local law enforcement offered more support in helping immigration agents find immigrants with criminal histories. He started by reducing the 3,000 Border Patrol and ICE personnel in Minneapolis by 700 last week.
Trump himself said in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday that “maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch” on immigration enforcement.
In June, as Bovino’s style of enforcement was just beginning, Homan said he was concerned about arresting migrants who had legally entered the U.S. to seek asylum.
“I think the more stories like that, people are going to question what we’re doing more,” Homan said.
Roughly one-third of the arrests made by ICE in the first nine months of the Trump administration were of immigrants with no criminal convictions, according to public data. That data did not include arrests made by Border Patrol.
In a New York Times/Siena poll conducted after Good’s shooting but before Pretti’s, 61% of respondents said ICE’s tactics had gone too far.
Although Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said overall immigration enforcement operations were focused on specific targets, immigration advocates, DHS officials speaking on the condition of anonymity, local law enforcement and internal DHS communications obtained by NBC News show the agency has instead boosted numbers by arresting immigrants encountered by agents regardless of criminal convictions — what Homan has in part advocated against.
The tactic has been pushed by Noem’s closest adviser, Corey Lewandowski, and Bovino, according to an October email obtained by NBC News. In the email, Bovino expressed frustration that he had been told to conduct only targeted operations for two weeks in Chicago before he could do more sweeping enforcement.