Tom Homan, President-elect Donald Trump’s top border adviser, said U.S. immigration officials will resume detaining the children of illegal immigrants with their parents in an interview with The Washington Post published Thursday.
The Trump administration will not allow illegal immigrants to remain in the country just because they have U.S.-born children, and will instead provide families with the choice of whether to exit together or be split up, Homan told the outlet.
“You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child,” Homan told The Washington Post. “You put your family in that position.”
Trump’s mass deportation efforts will require the construction of residential centers and family facilities, Homan told The Washington Post: “We’re going to need to construct family facilities … How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”
The comments come after the incoming border czar told Fox Business Tuesday that the White House will need $86 billion to jump-start the deportation process and that he hopes to increase the number of detention beds from tens of thousands to 100,000.
Judge Dolly Gee, an Obama-appointed federal judge who oversees immigration detention programs involving minors, ruled in 2019 that minors could only be held at family facilities for a maximum of 20 days — a time period that is often too short for the deportation process to take place. Homan told The Washington Post that policy could be revised once Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
Homan also told The Washington Post he’d resume U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement worksite raids — a practice President Joe Biden ended — and that the Trump administration would work to bring back the “Remain in Mexico” program, which harbored migrants claiming asylum in Mexico until their applications were processed.
Since Biden took office in January 2021, there have been over 8.5 million migrant encounters nationwide, with nearly three million inadmissible encounters taking place along the southern border in fiscal year 2024 alone.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children, with many repeatedly being sent to live in homes that case workers did not deem as safe. When congressional and state inquiries were launched to locate the missing children, the White House attempted to obstruct them by taking months to respond to oversight requests, according to a November Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee report.
“When Ranking Member Cassidy attempted to hold the Biden-Harris administration accountable, the administration made every effort to cover its failures up and to stonewall each new oversight effort — a course of action that continues today,” the report said. “The administration also refuses to comply with state-level efforts to investigate and prevent the trafficking and exploitation of [unaccompanied children] caused by its own weak sponsor vetting policies and the chaos.”
Homan told The Washington Post he would mobilize nonprofit groups and private contractors to help track down the missing children.
“I think some of these children will be in forced labor, and some will be in the sex trade,” he told The Washington Post. “I think some will be perfectly fine. We just want to make sure.”
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