Trump border czar reveals the chilling reason why he is living apart from his wife
Donald Trump 's border czar Tom Homan revealed that he's living apart from his wife because of death threats he's received for overseeing the president's deportation operations.
'I spent a lot of time with my boys growing up, but as I got more and more — climbed the ladder of what I've done with ICE director and now back — I don't see my family very much,' the veteran border security official told the New York Post reporter Miranda Devine on her podcast.
'My wife's living separately from me right now, mainly because I worked for many hours, but mostly because of the death threats against me.'
'She's someplace else,' the border czar continued. 'I see her as much as I can, but the death threats against me and my family are outrageous.'
Homan served 30 years as a border patrol agent before being appointed to executive roles at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Tom and his wife, Elizabeth Homan, reportedly share four children.
'Tom Homan is a patriot who is committed to making America safe again at great personal sacrifice,' White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Mail.
'He sleeps away from his family so the American people can sleep soundly knowing that he's getting dangerous criminal illegals out of their communities.'
The 63-year-old border czar says he's sacrificing family time to enact the president's sweeping deportation operation - one that already snared hundreds of thousands.
The Trump administration has deported around 200,000 individuals, Homan said in late May.
In addition, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), along with other officials, have arrested over 100,000 people suspected of breaking immigration laws.
That amounts to an average of 750 arrests per day - double what the average has been over the past decade.
Homan worked in Trump's first administration as acting ICE director for a year and a half before leaving after his nomination got hung up in the Senate.
The border czar was a contributor on Fox News for several years, too, often noting migrant crime happening along the border.
When the Republican called Homan to take a job in the second administration, he was with his wife, Elizabeth, at dinner.
'I was the first person he called, bringing back, which, again, was a proud moment, but I was actually out to dinner with my wife, and then my phone rang, and I looked down, and it says, 'POTUS.' And my wife says, "He's asking him to come back, isn't he?"' the border czar recounted.
'So I walked outside, and the first thing he said to me was, 'You've been bitching about it for four years. Well, come back and fix it.' So how do you say no?'
While on Fox, Homan tore into Biden's 'open border' policies that estimates suggest could have led to over 10 million illegal border crossings.
'There were 300,000 missing children under the last administration,' Homan shared on the 'Pod Force One' podcast.
'We've found thousands of them … We rescued victims of sex trafficking [and] two weeks ago, we rescued a 14-year-old that was already pregnant, living with adult men.'
'We rescued some victims of forced labor. We found children working on ranches and chicken farms, not going to school, but enslaved labor in the United States of America.'
Homan and other immigration officials also met with lawmakers to advocate for more border spending earlier this year.
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The Guardian
41 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘We're seeing the best of LA': as Ice raids haunt the city, Angelenos show up for each other
In the days after ramped-up immigration raids began in Los Angeles, 50-year-old Lorena, who has been running a tamale cart in Koreatown for decades, stayed home. So did her husband, who works as a day laborer. Worried about paying their bills, both of them after a few days went back out to work. 'My son would go around the block and watch out for us,' said Lorena, whom the Guardian is not identifying by her full name for fear of reprisal. He'd text them a warning when he suspected that immigration agents were nearby. Eventually, though, they concluded the effort was not only risky, but futile. There was no business. 'People are scared. They do not go out to buy anything,' she said. Then Lorena was offered a grant by a local advocacy group, KTown For All, which had raised money online from supporters to 'buy out' street vendors at risk of being detained. She and her husband have been able to remain home since, and keep a low profile. She knew the group because they had organized initiatives to support vendors during the height of the coronavirus pandemic – and on occasion she had worked with them to distribute her tamales to unhoused people and others in need. 'That is why I believe that when you give love, you receive love,' she said. 'I want more people to know about [how] this way they can also support more vendors, more sellers. Because there are many, many vendors who are still taking risks because they need to make money.' KTown for All has said publicly that its supporters donated enough money to cover a month's rent and food for at least 42 vendors and their families, and it has shared links to street vendor fundraising efforts in other Pasadena, LA's South Bay and other neighborhoods. The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The LA Street Vendor Solidarity Fund, a similar effort organized by several non-profits, has raised $80,000 so far, with the goal of raising at least $300,000. An estimated 1 million of Los Angeles county's more than 10 million residents are undocumented people, the largest undocumented population of any city in the US. Street vendor buyouts are just one of the ways Angelenos are responding to the Trump administration's raids, which are continuing to spread terror across Los Angeles, with many immigrant families afraid to leave their homes for school or work. 'Community members that have not been traditionally plugged into politics or the current state of affairs are plugging in – they're getting informed,'said Eunisses Hernandez, a 35-year-old city councilmember who represents a quarter-million people in a majority-Latino district in northern Los Angeles. Many Angelenos who did not attend protests against the new Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids are doing other kinds of work, Hernandez said, like providing 'know your rights' information to small businesses about interacting with law enforcement officials, or figuring out how to deliver food to immigrant families too afraid to leave home even to buy groceries. Mutual aid networks created to help people affected by the January's wildfires have been 'reinvigorated' to respond to the Trump administration's raids, Hernandez said. 'In this moment, while we're seeing the worst of our federal administration, we are seeing the best here in the city of Los Angeles,' she said. The pervasive fear of federal raids is reshaping the daily life of the city, leaving streets emptier and quieter. One in five local residents lives with someone undocumented or are undocumented themselves. Half the total population is Latino. 'Our economy is being destroyed, our culture is being destroyed,' said Odilia Yego, the executive director of Cielo, an advocacy group focused on local Indigenous migrant communities. 'The buzzing feeling of being an Angeleno is under attack.' When Yego went out with Cielo workers earlier this month to deliver food to 200 families, she said, the streets were eerily quiet, and restaurants were half-empty, raising concerns about how small businesses already battered by Covid, Hollywood strikes and the wildfires will weather this new crisis. It's not only undocumented residents who fear being snatched up by masked federal agents in raids community members say look and feel like kidnappings, Yego said. 'Even with documents, people are afraid to go out. Even citizens are afraid to go out. People are afraid to encounter an Ice agent regardless of their status, because of the level of violence they have seen on social media or on TV,' she said. Multiple US citizens in the Los Angeles area have reportedly been detained as part of immigration raids this month. As Cielo and similar advocacy groups help frightened immigrant families, other people are stepping up to help them. In early June, one of the city's most popular taquerias and an immigrant-owned coffee shop in West Hollywood held fundraisers for Cielo. 'We own a business, so we can't go protest,' one of the West Hollywood coffee shop's owners said. The Guardian is not identifying the businesses or its owners for fear of reprisal. Helping raise funds for Cielo was 'a way for us to show up to be a voice with our community'. 'In LA, we support each other during times of crisis,' Yego said. 'Someone sent us $100 and said: 'You helped me during the pandemic, and today, I'm able to give back.''
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Zohran Mamdani has unleashed a political earthquake
The surprise electoral success of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist running to be mayor of New York, the most prominent city on earth, is a political earthquake. The breadth and scope of his performance were predicted by no polls, no prognosticators, none of the wise men. The ramifications of this upset will be felt for years, across the US and the developed world. In the end, it wasn't even close. Mamdani's widespread appeal represents the total collapse of a Democratic party establishment that had weathered Donald Trump's first term with rhetorical resistance, and fumbled the beginning of the second with triangulating appeasement. This year, the favorability of the Democratic party has collapsed to record lows, not because of the popularity of the Trump administration or the Republican party, but because of its unpopularity with its own voters. Chuck Schumer caving to the president on an unpopular and devastating Republican spending bill was the last straw for many. The Democratic party and the resistance to Trump had been severed for the first time. There's anger across the country with its leadership, Democratic and Republican, in cities, suburbs and rural areas. According to Americans, things are not going well. Prices are up, wages are down and instability is at an all-time high. Nowhere is this more true than in our biggest city, New York, where the moderate Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, made a quid pro quo deal to keep himself out of prison on corruption charges in exchange for enforcing Trump's policies in a city where Trump had minimal political support. Enter Mamdani. Many major cities in the US, in recent years, had a two-party system, not between Democrats and Republicans, but between centrist Democrats and their progressive flank. The US, like all polities, has many organized political groupings, but due to byzantine electoral laws, only two official ones exist - the state-administered ballot lines. Nowhere is this more true than in New York, the crown jewel of the electoral socialist left in the United States for more than a century. Mamdani is the progeny of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the US's largest socialist organization in a century. He is among the many young people inspired by Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. The staying power of that campaign has asserted itself over the years. Most of the talented organizers and thinkers whom it shaped were in college or their early 20s. They were never going to stop being socialists. They just needed seasoning. Mamdani got involved in the DSA as a young man and honed his skills leading campaigns in the nearly all-volunteer organization. He has spent most of his adult life as a DSA organizer. After the New York City DSA had built sufficient infrastructure and he had learned the necessary skills, he was able to win election to the state assembly in 2020. But to Mamdani, democratic socialism isn't an identity or a set of principles. It is being part of and accountable to a democratic organization, the sort of working-class civil society that has atrophied in this country, but at one time built the backbone of the welfare state across western society and lent the muscle to the New Deal. Mamdani and the DSA cannot be separated. It's a different, and for many Americans new, but a deeply old way of thinking about politics. Political organizations represent different classes, which are necessarily in conflict. To win for your class, you must be a representative of working-class democracy. Mamdani was built by the DSA and the young leftwing milieu that emerged after the Sanders campaign. They cannot be separated. Not his charisma or campaign style. He is a product of the movement. His victory and its comprehensive level are shocking to nearly all. How did he do it? Combining new and old tactics. Mamdani had perhaps the most innovative social media campaign in American political history. Not jumping on tired memes, but showcasing his authenticity. He also borrowed old tactics. Mamdani harnessed the sort of retail diaspora politics that have always won in the world's most diverse city. He campaigned in dozens of languages, met leaders from ethnic groups from around the world and sold his vision in the style of Fiorello LaGuardia. This way, he was able to harness both the insurgent left, often caricatured as downwardly mobile, overly educated and overwhelmingly white, and the worldwide working-class diaspora that shapes the neighborhoods of New York. As he climbed the polls through steady mass organization, almost linearly, he began to face ever-increasing, and horrifying, attacks from capital and the powers that be, to the tune of a record $25m in outside spending. The one they homed in on was one that had been proven to take down leftwing leaders across the world, such as Jeremy Corbyn: antisemitism. All social justice-minded people are horrified by antisemitism, an ancient hatred. It's an accusation that would make anyone on the left, anyone of conscience, take notice. For this reason, used in a spurious way, it was an insidious attack that could break the left. However, in this election, the baseless smear backfired. There are several reasons for this. The first is overuse. It's quite blatant to continually accuse obviously deeply compassionate and humanistic people of an evil hatred without evidence. No one believes friendly and understanding social democrats in a secular urban milieu are pogromists or jihadists (despite nasty Islamophobic baiting about Mamdani's background), for obvious reasons. The second is the actual circumstances. Most accusations of antisemitism on the left have little or nothing to do with actual overt discrimination or hatred; they are almost entirely based on opinion of the state of Israel. As Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians and long-term eliminationist and revanchist ambitions, and ties itself closer to the far right in the US, Democratic voters in the US have made the rapid and historic transition to sympathizing with Palestinians over Israel by a nearly 3-1 margin. Even last year, this issue and money could win Democratic primaries. No longer. Lastly, Mamdani is in many ways a continuation of the Jewish left tradition in the United States. New York has long been the home of the most powerful electoral socialist left in the United States. The base for the Socialist party of America (SPA) or the American Labor party, many-time electoral winners, was the Jewish community. Jews in New York voted in the hundreds of thousands for socialists for decades. These are the same policies of so-called 'sewer socialism' (in which socialists ran cities like Milwaukee and boasted of excellent sewer systems), the same parties (DSA being the direct inheritor of the SPA), the same tradition and even the same neighborhoods as a century ago. The foundation of the American left. An unbroken line. Mamdani is the inheritor of the tradition of Baruch Vladeck, and of the socialists and trade unions that built New York. Even the membership of DSA and the staff of his campaign reflect this. So, how did Mamdani win support? He brought back class as the defining issue of politics. Class as a political divide has declined across the industrialized world for decades, beginning in the US. While Sanders reinjected a class message and a degree of class polarization back within the Democratic coalition, there were still shortcomings. Bernie did worse among Black voters across class. And Bernie and other democratic socialists relied heavily on the good graces of socially progressive upper-middle-class professionals, rendering socialists subordinate to or in coalition with their interests and organizations. After nearly a decade of work by the left, this class polarization seemed uncrackable. Until now. Mamdani underachieved compared with prior leftwing candidates in professional progressive areas like the Upper West Side. But he smashed through the racial barrier that had divided the working class. Few expected this before the votes rolled in. His base would be downwardly mobile white professionals, of course. But his clear message and innovative campaign brought back real class politics, of the kind that seemed a myth in the contemporary age. According to the New York Times, Mamdani did better with voters of color than with white voters. While he shed reliably progressive votes among the Times-reading, machine-hating liberals of Manhattan, he won them back many times over among working-class people of color who had never taken a second look at leftist candidates before. In this, he reversed nearly 30 years of anti-materialist political science theories. This may seem like something confined to New York City, a progressive bastion in a deep blue state. But it points a path forward for the left and for advocates of social justice and liberatory politics. Donald Trump's most shocking and profound gains in 2024 came among young voters, particularly men, Latino voters, Asian voters and urban voters in general. These are the exact demographics that came out in droves for Mamdani. The left has long shirked its responsibility to fight the far right, leaving it to the center as if the political spectrum were a rigorously enforced line rather than a fluid concept. But the center failed. And they sacrificed these demographics to Trump because these masses were fed up with the status quo. The center could never win them back. But the radical left actually could, through a targeted, economic, anti-establishment message. Mamdani's campaign did it, and brought people back from the far right on a massive scale, more than any anti-Trump rally could. In this way, campaigns like Mamdani's are actively practicing anti-fascism in a real way, by winning the targets of the right back to the left. The left needs to study this shocking election and take thorough notes. The first is that Mamdani was a product of real, organic, working-class organization in the DSA. The kind that has been dying out in this country for half a century and is disregarded by most. This lack of organization is the defining feature of our political time. The only way to the future is more people in the DSA, more people in unions, more people in civic organizations and the rebuilding of working-class community. Our institutions are hollow, but Mamdani and his 50,000 youthful volunteers are proof that they can be rebuilt, and that people yearn to do so. In 2017, a DSA organizer and philosopher named Michael Kinnucan said: 'US civic culture is so hollowed out at the grassroots level that in any city in the US if your organization can get 40 to 50 committed people in a room occasionally you're probably operating one of the five or six most potentially powerful grassroots organizations in your city.' This idea was foundational to DSA, especially in New York City, and shaped Mamdani. For many, it seemed a fantasy. Five hundred thousand votes later, across nearly every language and nationality in the world, it's a warning. To defeat the right, the left must learn from Mamdani and the DSA and rebuild mass working-class organization. Sure, charisma helps, but at its core, this win was an eight-year project that must be replicated everywhere if we are to defeat fascism and stop the worst horrors of the climate crisis. Mamdani is an Obama-level political talent, but most of all he is a call to return to real working-class organization. This is something the hollow entities of the Democratic or Republican parties could never defeat, and something they learned on Tuesday night. Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Cause of death revealed for father who took daughter on bucket list hike up Maine's highest mountain
A father's cause of death has been revealed weeks after he and his daughter died while hiking up Maine 's highest mountain. Esther, 28, and Tim Keiderling, 58, of Ulster Park, New York, were found dead on Mount Katahdin earlier this month. A medical examiner revealed Tim died from hypothermia on Thursday, News Center Maine reported. Authorities previously determined Esther died from blunt force trauma, as her body was found beneath a snowy boulder. They believe she slipped off a trail and slid down the icy mountain terrain - crashing into the boulders below. The father-daughter duo embarked on the strenuous journey early on June 1. For the experienced hikers, trekking up the 5,269-foot mountain was a 'bucket list' item - although Esther eerily revealed on her Substack she was 'a little nervous' about the trek. 'If you don't see me back on Substack notes again, that's where I am,' she wrote, referring to the famously difficult Abol Trail. They were last seen on the mountain's Hunt Trail at around 10:15am that day, according to park Baxter State Park officials. After not hearing from Esther and Tim by the following evening, their family grew worried for their safety. Authorities officially declared them missing on June 3, swiftly searching for the pair using helicopters, ground searchers and K9 teams. They made the horrific discovery of Tim's corpse the day they launched the search, according to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife. Esther's body was found the next day, about 1,000 feet from her father's near the summit. Hikers who saw them before their disappearance noted there were extremely harsh weather conditions. The mountain's peak was being hit with 40-mile-per-hour winds, rain, sleet and snow in frigid temperatures. 'They were doing a day hike, a bucket list thing, to climb this amazing mountain,' Tim's brother-in-law Heinrich Arnold wrote on Facebook. 'Both wonderful people, full of life, full of joy.' After Tim's body was found, his brother Joe Keiderling told WMTV: 'No one has had a brother like mine. 'Tim lived exuberantly. He loved life, loved people, loved God. He was a storyteller like no one I've known with a rich sense of humor.' In their joint obituary published in the Daily Freeman, Esther was described as 'a sensitive, deeply-thinking woman who loved reading and writing, with a particular interest in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edna St. Vincent Millay.' Tim was said to have an especially close bond with Esther, as she was his oldest child. 'What drew both him and Esther to high places was always the view – the broad expanse of God's handiwork, laid out below them,' the obituary reads. Both Tim and Esther were members of the Bruderhof faith, a Christian community for people living in rural areas. In a statement after their passing, their employer Rifton Equipment said they were 'deeply saddened' by their sudden deaths on the mountain.
