Jim Cason and David Brooks
Correspondents
La Jornada Newspaper
Tuesday, November 12, 2024, p. 20
Washington and New York. President-elect Donald Trump indicated that sealing the border with Mexico and initiating mass deportations of undocumented immigrants will be among his main and immediate priorities, by including among his first government appointments Stephen Miller, the architect of his anti-immigrant policies. now and during his first term in office, as deputy chief of staff for policy, and Tom Homan, former head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), as his border tsar.
The appointments of Homan and Miller – the second not yet announced by the president-elect, but by Vice President-elect JD Vance and others yesterday – were received as confirmation that from his first day in office, Trump intends to begin fulfill their anti-immigrant promises. In a message on the social network X, Trump announced that Homan will be in charge of the southern border, the northern border, and all maritime and air security. Furthermore, he noted in his message that Homan will be in charge of all deportation of irregular foreigners back to their countries of origin.
Homan began his professional career in the Border Patrol and rose to become chief of law enforcement and expulsions during the administration of Barack Obama, who long before Trump earned the nickname of critics of chief deporter due to the high number of deportations and expulsions of migrants during his administration.
As acting head of ICE in the first year and a half of Trump’s first presidency, Homan was responsible for the dramatic increase in deportations and implemented the measure of forcibly separating at least 5,000 children from their immigrant families. When Homan was asked if he authored this measure in a recent interview with CBS News, he responded: I didn’t write the memo to separate families. I signed the memorandum. When asked if this measure should be considered again, he responded: needs to be considered, absolutely. He added that perhaps the next Trump administration would not need to separate families, because they They may be deported together.
Trump has promised the largest mass deportation in the country’s history. But analysts point out that implementing such an operation would be very expensive. The American Immigration Council, in a report issued in early October, estimated that the cost of deporting about 13 million immigrants could reach $968 billion. But Trump, in one of his first comments after his electoral victory, repeated that the cost does not matter, it needs to be done.
Miller contemplates arrests with the National Guard
Elevating Miller to deputy chief of staff in the White House also sends a signal that the president wants to proceed with his mass deportation and obtain the resources as soon as possible. According to Miller himself and others, among the proposals already prepared are the use of the National Guard to carry out mass arrests, establish detention camps for undocumented immigrants and declare a national emergency in order to use government funds and personnel not authorized for this purpose in the raids.
Trump’s team has already prepared executive orders that could be signed on January 20, 2025, the day Trump will take office. These orders include those to allow the expedited expulsion of undocumented immigrants and restore the emergency under the so-called Title 42, which also facilitates expulsions. Miller has said the new administration intends to restore the Remain in Mexico program, which would force immigrants seeking asylum to wait in Mexico while their claims are processed, although experts say that requires approval from the Mexican government.
Some indicate that it will be very difficult to implement these measures. Trump has repeated that he is using as a model for his proposal the measure used by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, which was the largest deportation operation in the history of the country. Operation Wetback, as it was known, was implemented through the Border Patrol, using military-style raids to arrest, detain and deport up to some 1.3 million undocumented Mexicans. Many were deported in cattle cars on trains from Los Angeles and other cities to the border.
Immigrant rights advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are already preparing legal lawsuits to try to block the implementation of these measures, as they managed to do to some extent during the first Trump administration. Meanwhile, immigration attorneys are trying to prepare for what one called tsunami for immigrant communities in an interview with The Day (https://www.jornada.com.mx/2024/11/08/politica/002n1pol).
Although it should be noted that even before Trump’s arrival, deportations have increased, and in fact President Joe Biden deported more undocumented immigrants in 2023 than Trump in any of the years of his first government, what is coming is an anti-immigrant attack unprecedented.
These measures, according to Miller, could also be accompanied by plans to annul several temporary protection programs for undocumented immigrants. Among them, a program that has allowed asylum seekers from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua to temporarily enter the United States while their cases are processed. Likewise, it is being considered to eliminate the DACA program, which granted temporary legalization to the so-called dreamers –those who as minors were brought to this country by relatives– and another program, Temporary Protected Status or TPS, granted to immigrants from certain countries considered dangerous.
Two senators close to Trump, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, have also proposed modifying the laws so that children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the United States are not automatically granted citizenship, but that requires a change in the Constitution. of the United States.
Reviews from Mar-a-Lago
Meanwhile, the competition to fill key positions in the next Trump administration continues apace, after the first appointment of Susie Wiles, co-chair of the Republican’s campaign, as chief of staff, the first woman to hold that position in history.
According to the media, Trump has a situation room installed in his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida, where he is evaluating dossiers digital of possible candidates for strategic positions in your government. There he is accompanied by a small group that includes at different times the vice president-elect JD Vance, and a couple of billionaires, Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, X and SpaceX, and Howard Lutnick, head of the financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald and who He is co-chair of the transition team.
This team also announced yesterday that right-wing federal representative Elise Stefanik will be the ambassador to the United Nations and that former federal representative Lee Zeldin will head the Environmental Protection Agency where he will dismantle environmental regulations and promote the expansion of fossil fuel production that Trump promised in the campaign.