President-elect Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan vowed to build “family facilities” to help detain and deport the massive number of migrants who have entered the country illegally in recent years — along with their US-born children.
Tens of thousands of migrant families would be able to be detained in the “soft-sided” tent structures before their deportation, Homan told the Washington Post in an interview published Thursday.
But despite the aggressive removal operation slated to begin on Day One of Trump’s second term, the border czar promised that non-citizen parents with American children will have the opportunity to choose whether they want to be split up or be deported together.
Homan said families will de detained together and will have the opportunity to decide if they want to be deported together or split up. The Washington Post via Getty Images“We need to show the American people we can do this and not be inhumane about it,” he said. “We can’t lose the faith of the American people.”
US citizens will not be detained, but will have the choice whether to stay or deport themselves along with their parents.
“We’re not going to detain US citizen children, which means, you know, 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 to get them,” he told “NewsNation” in a Thursday interview.
“The best thing to do is for the family to self-deport themselves,” he added. “That makes it easier for the family. They can get their arrangements all together and they leave on their own behalf.”
Homan, 63, has pledged to carry out the largest deportation operation in US history and previously stipulated that those who crossed the border illegally will not be spared from the removals, even if they are part of family units that include citizens.
“Here’s the issue,” he added. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”
Congress will have to allocate sufficient funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to complete the operation, which Homan projected will be much “larger” than President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s effort to kick out 1.1 million Mexican laborers in 1954.
Migrant plead with the Texas National Guard to be let in on the north embankment of the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas in order to be processed by Border Patrol on March 20, 2024. Omar Ornelas/El Paso Times / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Trump said he will begin mass deportations on Day One and hopes to carry out the largest in American history. KEN BLEVINS/WILMINGTON STAR-NEWS / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn ImagesA former ICE official himself, Homan has estimated the agency will need at least 100,000 beds for detentions and at least $86 billion in funding for the mass exodus.
“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” he told the Washington Post. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”
The deportations will not involve “sweeps” through neighborhoods — as some of Homan’s critics have contended.
Border Patrol agents patrol the area near where Attorney General Jeff Sessions addresses the media during a press conference at Border Field State Park on May 7, 2018 in San Ysidro, CA. Getty Images“I don’t see this thing as being sweeps and the military going through neighborhoods,” he noted, arguing it will be “targeted” to those with criminal records.
There will also be a separate plan to find the more than 300,000 migrant children that have gone missing since crossing the border, according to the incoming border czar.
The missing migrant kids have been of particular concern to Trump, who raised the alarm on the campaign trail about documented instances of the unaccompanied minors being used for forced labor or exploited by sex traffickers.
Tom Homan during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, US, on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto/Shutterstock“I think some of these children will be in forced labor, and some will be in the sex trade,” Homan grimly assessed of the hundreds of thousands of migrant kids loose in the US.
“I think some will be perfectly fine,” he also said. “We just want to make sure.”
Trump, 78, is preparing other executive actions to dismantle retiring President Biden’s policies on Day One — including a “humanitarian parole” program that has let in up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela since January 2023.
The soon-to-be 47th president also has signaled he is intent on finishing construction of a southern border wall, revoking birthright citizenship and reinstating his “Remain in Mexico” policy to require migrants seeking asylum to await immigration court hearings outside the US.






