Border czar Tom Homan tells 'Pod Force One' that ICE crackdown on Mexican, Colombian drug cartels preceded LA riots
Border czar Tom Homan revealed in an exclusive sit-down with Post columnist Miranda Devine that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were originally sent to Los Angeles as part of a crackdown on sources of drug cartel funding — before the city descended into riots and looting.
In a new episode of 'Pod Force One,' Homan disclosed that this month's Los Angeles clashes over ICE enforcement came after officers had served criminal arrest warrants for 'money laundering, tax evasion' and other cartel-linked crimes — and rounded up 'child sexual predators, rapists, [and] murderers.'
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington. Subscribe here!
'There is [a] strong suspicion that some of that funding is sent to Mexico and Colombia to fund cartel activity,' Homan told Devine of the underlying criminal probe.
'It was a criminal operation, a criminal investigation and criminal search warrant,' the border czar said, referencing 'millions of dollars' in potential cartel revenue. 'But right away, the left went nuts.'
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, both Democrats, denounced the ICE raids that resulted in the apprehension of more than 100 illegal migrants – including five gang members and others with past criminal charges of assault, cruelty to children and robbery.
'Everybody talked about the racist ICE, even members of Congress and yeah, Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass,' Homan recalled on the podcast. 'The truth was, look at who we arrested. Look at the warrants we served.'
Newsom, in a primetime address posted to his X account June 11, denounced what he called 'large-scale workplace raids' by the Trump administration, which he said were 'targeting hardworking immigrant families.'
4 Homan told Devine that ICE officers served warrants for money laundering, tax evasion and other cartel-linked crimes in LA.
Tamara Beckwith
4 'Everybody talked about the racist ICE, even members of Congress and yeah, Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass,' Homan recalled on the podcast. 'The truth was, look at who we arrested. Look at the warrants we served.'
Barbara Davidson/NYPost
'In response, everyday Angelinos came out to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly, to protest their government's actions,' the governor added. 'In turn, the State of California and the City and County of Los Angeles sent our police officers to help keep the peace and, with some exceptions, they were successful.'
The riots will end up costing Los Angeles taxpayers as much as $20 million for police overtime and repairs to damaged city property, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Trump initially dispatched 2,000 California National Guard members to restore order — as photos and video of rioters waving Mexican flags and setting fire to cop cars rocketed around social media — in a move that Newsom also denounced in his video message as a 'brazen abuse of power.'
Full episode
Newsom's administration later sued Trump for deploying the Guard members, but an appeals court ruled in favor of the Republican administration.
Homan himself caused controversy by suggesting that Newsom and Bass had opened themselves up to possible criminal prosecution for allegedly thwarting federal law enforcement operations.
'We're trying to shut down cartel activity, which is killing Americans. We're trying to take the worst of the worst off the streets of LA,' the border czar told Devine.
4 Newsom, in a primetime address posted to his X account as the riots raged in Los Angeles, denounced the 'large-scale workplace raids' by the Trump admin 'targeting hardworking immigrant families.'
JOHN G MABANGLO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
4 Photos and video of rioters waving Mexican flags and setting fire to cop cars took off on social media.
Toby Canham for NY Post
'You would think the mayor and the governor … will say … 'Thank you for making our state safer,' because every criminal threat we take off the streets of LA makes that city more safe,' Homan added.
'Protest all you want,' he warned. 'We have teams out in LA today, we'll have teams out in LA tomorrow. We're going to keep doing … what we're doing. You're not gonna stop us.'
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The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The other night, while watching a baseball game, I saw my first ad for self-deportation. One minute Shohei Ohtani was at the plate and then suddenly there was Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, looking stern and urging immigrants to self-deport using the administration's new app, CBP Home. 'Do what's right,' Noem advised. 'Leave now.' The taxpayer-funded ad had started like a campaign commercial, praising President Donald Trump for locking down the southern border. Then it flashed images of rape suspects, alleged gang members, and others arrested by ICE. And then came footage of U.S. deportees sent to El Salvador, stripped to their underwear and forced to kneel before black-clad prison guards in masks. 'If you are here illegally, you're next,' Noem said into the camera. She seemed to imply that anyone who doesn't use CBP Home will go straight to the Gulag. [Adam Serwer: The deportation show] 'You will never return,' Noem said. 'But if you register using our CBP Home app and leave now, you could be allowed to return legally.' Noem's carrot-or-stick offer distilled the broader messaging strategy of the mass-deportation campaign at the center of Trump's second term. The campaign, and its goal of 1 million deportations a year, has been designed to generate fear using harsh enforcement tactics and lurid imagery: military flights to Guantánamo, foreign prison cells packed with face-tattooed inmates, federal agents in battle gear fanning out in U.S. streets like they're storming Fallujah. The more the Trump administration can scare immigrants, the more likely they will opt to leave on their own, officials have told me. They view self-deportation as a more humane alternative to ICE handcuffs and believe that its appeal will grow as the crackdown intensifies. But how to encourage self-deporters and keep track of their departures? That's what CBP Home is for. The Trump administration has not said how many people have used CBP Home to self-deport. But a senior administration official told me that more than 7,000 people have signed up so far, and of those, more than 3,000 have confirmed departures using the app. Use of the app is growing fast, but that's still fewer than than the number of people ICE officers arrest over an average three-day period. The administration is trying to scare migrants into leaving while expecting their trust and personal information on the way out. The Trump administration sees the app as a psychological instrument of its policy goals—which, ironically, is how the Biden administration also used it. In January 2023, when record numbers of migrants were streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border illegally each month, Biden officials turned to CBP One, a scheduling app that had been set up years earlier by U.S. Customs and Border Protection primarily to facilitate cargo inspections for trucking companies. Biden officials rejiggered it to allow asylum seekers to book an appointment at an official border crossing. Instead of hiring a smuggler to cross illegally, smartphone users could upload their personal information and photo, then await an appointment. CBP offered about 1,500 appointments a day all along the border at a time when illegal crossings were averaging more than 8,000 daily. Immigrant-advocacy groups denounced the move as a ploy to deny safe refuge to people fleeing for their lives. The app was glitchy and prone to crashing, they said, and it forced applicants to wait months in dangerous Mexican border cities. But CBP One soon began to work as intended. 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No administration had ever used executive parole authority—the president's ability to waive people in without a visa—on such a scale. Republicans denounced CBP One as an 'open border' app and 'Ticketmaster for illegal immigration.' On the campaign trail, then-candidate Trump called it 'the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals.' Over two years, Biden allowed nearly 1 million migrants to enter the country using CBP One. Trump froze CBP One entries on his first day in office and canceled the pending appointments of 30,000 migrants who'd finally had their number called. CBP One appeared to be finished. But Stephen Miller, the powerful White House adviser behind Trump's mass-deportation campaign, had been working on a plan to use the app for a completely different purpose. Trump officials relaunched CBP One in March, changing its name to CBP Home. Its new purpose is to allow migrants to schedule their own self-deportations. 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You may also want to help find support for the people you care about, pack up the things you'd like to bring with you, or make living arrangements for the next phase of your journey.' I recently spoke at length with a senior administration official involved in the relaunch of CBP Home and the self-deportation strategy. Miller came up with the idea of rebranding the much-maligned CBP app, according to the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. The political symbolism—using the app to subtract immigrants, rather than schedule their entry—was irresistible. The app is geared especially toward the growing numbers of immigrants who have been living and working legally in the United States with some form of provisional residency that Trump has taken away. They include the 1 million people who used CBP One to enter as 'parolees,' along with the more than 500,000 from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who arrived through a separate Biden program. Trump has told them to leave the United States immediately. Another roughly 1 million immigrants with Temporary Protected Status—from Venezuela, Afghanistan, Honduras, and more than a dozen other nations—are at risk of losing their legal status or already have. Trump has introduced additional bureaucratic coercions to get more people to leave: $998-a-day fines for migrants who are 'illegally present,' and potential criminal penalties for those who fail to provide the government with their personal information and whereabouts through a new 'registry.' Fines will be waived for CBP Home users who self-deport, ICE says. [Read: Trump's deportations aren't what they seem] The Department of Homeland Security recently published a promotional video showing happy-looking families boarding a self-deportation flight to Honduras and Colombia after accepting the cash stipends. DHS called it 'Project Homecoming'; staffers handed out free toys on the tarmac. One young family got a stuffed elephant and a handful of Colombian flags before climbing the stairs to the plane. A staffer handed a pink teddy bear to a shy little girl who looked no older than 3. No one in the video explains why they chose to leave or even speaks at all. DHS wants the self-deportation flights to serve as a 'visual contrast' to the fearsome videos of the deportations to the Salvadoran prison, the official told me, where 'you get loaded off in handcuffs and get a haircut.' The videos promoting self-deportation are part of a $200 million domestic and international DHS ad campaign. I checked with half a dozen or so immigration attorneys to see if they have clients considering the administration's offer. No takers yet, they said. 'I have a feeling that it will start happening soon,' Jonathan Ryan, an attorney in Texas who represents asylum seekers and refugees, told me. 'People are in shock right now, but I suspect the next step will be to start looking at their options.' Some economists predict that the foreign-born population of the United States could shrink in 2025 for the first time in 50 years as a result of Trump's crackdown. It's unclear how many people have voluntarily left the United States without using the app or telling the government. Biden officials used the CBP app to tap into migrants' hopes; Trump is banking on their fears. For the app to be a success—and to match the level of usage that Biden officials achieved—the administration is working to make ICE deportations as scary and intimidating as possible. The administration expects use of CBP Home to grow if it can convince more migrants that it's only a matter of time before ICE finds them, the senior official told me. 'It's a very dignified way of leaving on your own terms, as opposed to the harsher version of having to be encountered and apprehended by ICE at an unknown time and place,' the official said. The official told me that the self-deportation plan is easily 'scalable' and meant to expand as the pace of ICE arrests and deportations increases. Because parolees had to provide the government with their contact information and other personal data when they entered the country using CBP One, the government has much more ability to reach them and ratchet up the pressure than it has with other migrants who arrived undetected. DHS is telling migrants that voluntary departure through CBP Home may improve their 'future immigration options.' Trump officials have not said what that means. Immigrant advocates say it sounds like a ruse to trick people into thinking they'll arrive home and be able to apply for a visa to come right back, which is not the case. The DHS official I spoke with said there is no formal mechanism to reward a visa applicant who previously registered a departure through CBP Home, though their decision would be viewed favorably during the review process. Andrea Flores, a former Biden-administration immigration adviser who is now a policy director at the advocacy group told me DHS's messaging is 'incredibly dishonest.' The agency is employing social media 'to misuse images of either compassion or to overuse images of harsh criminality,' Flores said. [Read: We're about to find out what mass deportations really look like] 'They're using every single tool that DHS has to expand the sheer number of removals without putting any thought into how people make their choices or the incentives and disincentives they're creating,' Flores said. 'All they're doing with CBP Home is to push people further away from trusting the government.' The DHS official I spoke with said the government has no immediate plans to increase the $1,000 exit bonus to entice more people to leave, but the payments could go higher. The average cost to arrest, detain, and deport someone is $17,121, according to the latest DHS figures, and the department said it will save 70 percent of that every time someone uses the app to leave the United States on their own. DHS says it uses a geolocation feature in CBP Home to confirm that someone is at least three miles outside the United States before they're eligible to receive the payment. Trump officials have another incentive to promote CBP Home: It allows them to count confirmed departures toward the president's deportation goal of 1 million people a year. The latest ICE statistics show that the agency has carried out about 125,000 deportations since Trump took office. DHS will need many, many more people to register with the app to hit the president's target. Article originally published at The Atlantic
