Trump's border tsar: We'll flood liberal cities with ICE raids

Telegraph

21 hours ago

Donald Trump's border tsar says he will 'flood the zone' with arrest squads in liberal sanctuary cities as he punches back against protests that have rocked Los Angeles for days.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Tom Homan said the protesters will do nothing to slow the pace of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detentions.
'If they think they're going to shut ICE operations down, they're wrong,' he said, after returning to Washington DC from California, where he had seen the protests up close.
'What they're going to see is an increase in ICE operations especially in sanctuary cities.'
Last week the Department of Homeland Security issued a list of 500 cities, counties and states it said obstructed the Trump administration's deportation plan by protecting illegal immigrants.
Mr Homan said he already had teams operating across places including New York and Chicago, where local law enforcement did not share immigration status of people in detention.
'We're going to send massive teams, we are going to flood the zone,' he said.
'If we can't arrest the bad guy in jail we'll arrest them in the neighbourhood. If we can't find them there we'll arrest them at a workplace.
'So sanctuary cities are gonna get exactly what they don't want – more agents in the neighbourhood, more work site enforcement operations.'
Mr Homan, a former police officer who has also served as acting head of ICE, is the public face of Mr Trump's operation to deport as many as a million people in a year.
So far, he said, the number was at about 140,000.
But with fewer people crossing the southern border the pace of detentions has slowed since the Trump administration took power.
The result has been a broader operation to find migrants wherever they might be.
Immigration officers, backed by FBI agents, raided several sites around Los Angeles on Friday triggering protests that grew into riots at the weekend.
Mr Trump responded by sending in 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines.
Since then protests have spread around the country offering Democratic politicians their first real chance to unite against Mr Trump.
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, accused the administration of drawing a 'military dragnet' across the nation's second biggest city.
However, Mr Homan said media coverage had missed a key point about the raids.
'It wasn't an immigration raid, it was a criminal investigation,' he said.
The operation was investigating money laundering, tax evasion and customs fraud at a business, he said.
'The big overarching investigation is looking at whether some of this money is making it to Mexico and Columbia to fund cartel activities,' he said.
Relatives and protesters arrived as news of the raids spread. Some tried to confront the federal agents wearing camouflage.
One person fell to the ground in front of a vehicle as he attempted to stop its progress.
Mr Homan said the FBI and ICE were investigating several organisations he believed supplied bricks and gas masks to protesters.
'So we know there's a couple organisations that are behind it that's under criminal investigation,' he said.
'I can't talk about it but we're going to prosecute them to the full extent of the law.'
Online conspiracy theories have – without any evidence – suggested that George Soros, the Jewish donor to liberal causes, or Karen Bass, the city's mayor, were responsible for depositing pallets of bricks at strategic locations.
Other commentators point out that one of the biggest flashpoints was beside a Home Depot store, which would have been stocked with building materials.
Protests slowed on Tuesday and Wednesday, in part because of a curfew.
Mr Homan said his officers had been placed at risk, night after night.
'I was there Friday night. I saw the federal building surrounded with close to 1000 people,' he said. 'I saw the threats. I saw the damage.
'I saw them trying to breach the federal building.'
He said officers had been doxxed and assaulted for trying to do their job. Sending in the troops was not a piece of political theatre or an effort to create a crisis.
'Thank God President Trump deployed the National Guard when he did,' he added.