MILWAUKEE — On Wednesday night, Thomas Homan, who oversaw former President Donald Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant regime as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, stepped onto the principle stage of the Republican Nationwide Conference and described immigrants as an existential menace to America.
“This isn’t mismanagement,” Homan mentioned of President Joe Biden’s border polices. “This isn’t incompetence. This is by design. It’s a choice. This is national suicide!”
Trump just lately promised to rehire Homan if he retakes the White Home — one thing Homan described as inevitable.
“I have a message for the millions of illegal aliens who Joe Biden allowed to enter the country in violation of federal law,” Homan mentioned. “Start packing, because you’re going home!”
Jose Luis Magan by way of Related Press
Solely two years in the past, Homan was invited to talk at a a lot smaller occasion: the America First Political Motion Convention, a white supremacist confab organized by Nick Fuentes, the top of the deeply racist and antisemitic “groyper” motion. HuffPost first reported that Homan was scheduled to talk on the 2022 occasion, with Homan explaining that his assistant had organized his look and that they might have confused Fuentes’ group with one other right-wing group. In his telling, it was solely when Homan was truly at AFPAC, sitting at a desk making ready his remarks, that he determined to do a Google seek for Fuentes’ title.
Google shot again article after article labeling Fuentes a white nationalist, however Homan had been skeptical — he felt he knew what it was wish to unfairly be labeled a “racist.” Then he learn an article about Fuentes praising Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. That was a bridge too far for Homan. He obtained up and left earlier than the occasion started.
Afterward, HuffPost requested Homan if it involved him that somebody like Fuentes — an admirer of Adolf Hitler who marched alongside neo-Nazis on the lethal 2017 Unite the Proper rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — would need him to talk at his convention. He demurred, reiterating that he’s not racist. However a couple of minutes later, he known as HuffPost to make a clarification. “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” he mentioned of Fuentes and the groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know.”
Two years later, Homan is on the cusp of enacting anti-immigrant insurance policies that may thrill Fuentes and the groypers.
“Trump comes back in January. I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he mentioned earlier this month on the Nationwide Conservatism convention. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
Homan is listed as a contributor to Challenge 2025, a blueprint for an authoritarian second Trump administration that was written largely by the Heritage Basis, the place he’s a visiting fellow. The 900-page doc requires mass deportations of all “immigration violators” — a imaginative and prescient of sweeping raids and separated households.
“We are going to have a historic deportation operation, because you’ve got a historic, illegal immigration, crossing the southern border,” Homan mentioned on the Nationwide Conservatism convention, later including: “No one’s off the table. If you’re in the country illegally, it’s not OK. If you’re in the country illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder. … The bottom line is: Every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It’s a crime to enter this country illegally.”
If Homan as soon as once more leads ICE, he’ll be serving below a president who has promised to deport 20 million individuals. Earlier this yr Trump mentioned these 20 million immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
It was language that echoed the phrases of one other far-right chief. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf.”
