Tom Homan also said that undocumented parents of US-born children will be deported, with or without their kids. US immigration authorities will resume the controversial policy of putting families with children in detention centres as part of a drive to deport undocumented immigrants, the incoming Trump administration’s ‘border czar’, Tom Homan, has said.
Homan, regarded as the “architect” of the widely vilified family separation policy applied to undocumented immigrants in the first Trump administration, also said officials would not hesitate to deport parents whose children were American citizens because they had been born in the US.
It would be left to parents to decide whether they want to depart the country as a family, or leave their children in the US, thus splitting up their families. “Here’s the issue,” Homan said in an interview with the Washington Post. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”.
He said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials would hold parents with children in soft-sided tent structures similar to those used to handle immigration surges at the US southern border. “We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” Homan said. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”.
The Biden administration ended family detention in 2021, closing three facilities with about 3,000 beds that Ice had operated. The closures followed criticism from immigration advocates and paediatricians, who warned that such conditions were harmful for children.
