President Donald Trump’s border czar has admitted that authorities have found it “hard” to find undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on State of the Union, Tom Homan said that whole teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are having to raid neighborhoods to carry out the administration’s deportation plans.
“It is hard because rather than one man arresting one bad guy in a jail, we’ve got to send a whole team to the field to find someone that doesn’t want to be found,” he said in an interview Sunday.
“It’s hard work, but we’re not giving up,” he added. “We’re coming.”
Homan said it was especially difficult to locate targets in sanctuary cities such as New York, which has a policy of not cooperating with federal immigration enforcement efforts. In what some critics have accused of being quid pro quo, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has allowed ICE to operate at Rikers Island prison in exchange for the Justice Department dropping corruption charges against the mayor. (Homan has denied that
Homan said he was “not happy” with arrest numbers, which lag far behind targets.
“You said roughly 14,000 migrants have been arrested in the first month of this administration, and that’s well below the 1,500 daily arrests that the president says he wants to see,” the CNN host pointed out. “What’s the struggle?”
“Arrests conducted by ICE in the interior of the United States are two and a half times higher than were a year ago during the Biden administration,” he said. “So ICE is doing a great job.”
The administration has stopped publishing daily arrest numbers, saying it would release statistics monthly to conserve resources. Immigration arrests, however, have dramatically decreased since November, according to Axios.
Homan went on to explain that he would employ larger teams to boost the number of arrests.
“I’m not happy with the numbers because we got a lot of criminals to find,” he said. “So what we’re talking about right now is increasing the number of teams, increasing the targeting, the division of ICE that creates the targets, finding who these people are, what the criminal history is, and we’re most likely to find him.
“The numbers are a lot higher than the Biden administration, but we’ve got to do more,” he later said. “We’re making the operational changes now that I requested.”
Homan also said he would only send agents to raid high schools in specific cases.
“The leftists have tried to scare the American people,” he said. “We’re not raiding schools, we’re not rating churches, we’re not rating college campuses.”
“But if we have a ... significant public safety threat or national security—let’s say, for instance, an MS-13 member who’s a senior in the high school who’s wanted for drug distribution or strong-armed robberies—we will go to that school and arrest that MS 13 member.”
