Monday, November 11, 2024

Seattle Times carries AP story - Tom Homan will be Trump's Border Czar. Word search of the story AP chose to publish yields nothing on "Heritage" nor "Project 2025."

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/trump-announces-tom-homan-former-director-of-immigration-enforcement-will-serve-as-border-czar --and-- 

https://apnews.com/article/trump-homan-ice-border-czar-7dea915b5ea43896390b8020d254f887

No mention of Heritage or Project 2025.  Separation not mentioned either.

However, websearch https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Tom-Homan+project-2025 -past day- yields:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-tom-homan-immigration-border-b2644925.html -- and -- https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/tom-homans-old-spat-video-with-aoc-pramila-jayapal-viral-after-trump-picks-him-as-border-czar/articleshow/115184258.cms -- 

That last item fleshes out a few things AP omitted:

Republicans cheered for Tom Homan after President-elect Donald Trump named former ICE director Tom Homan as the Border Czar of the new administration. MAGA supporters shared a video of his spat with Democrat Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and marveled at his style of shutting 'unintelligent' Democrats.
The Tom Homan - AOC video is from 2019 in which AOC asked Tom Homan whether he was the author of a memo. In reply, Homan said he signed the memo but he was not the author of the memo. Then they debated family separation and zero tolerance over the immigration system. Homan always stood by zero-tolerance immigration system where family members were separated during detention and deportation proceedings.
"In case you aren’t familiar with Donald Trump’s new Border Czar Tom Homan," MAGA supporter Benny Johnson wrote presenting another video of Homan debating Pramila Jayapal. "You work for me. I am a taxpayer," Homan told Jayapal in the video.

[...] Over the years, Homan's disposition towards AOC didn't change. Early this year, he said AOC is not very smart after AOC criticised Biden's move to restrict asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. "Doing Trump impressions isn't how we beat Trump. Seeking asylum is a legal right of all people. In the face of authoritarian threat, we should not bucle [sic] on our principles -- we should commit to them," AOC said.
Homan said AOC needs to be honest. "... this isn't about true asylum. This is about getting to the United States, this is about being released, this is about failing to leave the country as order by the courts. They'll hide out and be a fugitive for a few years waiting for the next amnesty, waiting for the next DACA. All these families coming across now, that's your next DACA," he said.

Tom Homan contributed to Project 2025

Called the father of family separation in immigration policies, Tom Homan was reportedly a contributor to Project 2025 from which Donald Trump distanced himself and said he did not know who were the people behind Project 2025. When Trump announce Homan as the Border Czar, he wrote, " I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders. Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin. Congratulations to Tom. I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long awaited for, job."

The  Independent story includes:

The immigration hardliner served as the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) between 2017 and 2018.

The president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform overnight that Homan would be in charge of “the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security.”

Homan will be involved in Trump’s stated goal of carrying out the “largest deportation operation in American history” through federal, state, and local law enforcement by invoking the same 1798 law used to carry out mass Japanese internment during the Second World War.

Under the separation initiative, immigration officials broke with the longstanding practice of keeping migrant families together and out of detention, instead sending parents to immigration court for removal proceedings and children to the care of a separate agency.

Immigration offenses are considered civil violations, not criminal ones, and many of the families first presented as asylum-seekers, but they were soon on the fast track out of the country.

Trump will bring former ICE chief Tom Homan back into his administration
Trump will bring former ICE chief Tom Homan back into his administration (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

The practice separated at least 5,000 families, many permanently, as parents were sent abroad and the Trump administration initially declined to keep track of where they ended up. As of this May, an estimated 1,400 families remained apart.

Trump has been eager to bring Homan, a Project 2025 contributor, back into the fold, telling a radio host during the campaign, “He’s coming on board.”

As Homan boasted during a conference in July, “They ain’t seen s*** yet...Wait until 2025.”

When asked in a recent ‘60 Minutes’ interview about whether that operation would entail returning to family separation, Homan suggested it “needs to be considered absolutely.”

"Their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally,” Homan explained. “So he created that crisis."

According to reporting from The Atlantic, Homan may have been the first government official to seriously propose intentional family separation back in 2014, though officials dismissed this at the time as “heartless and impractical,” given both the moral and logistical costs of separating children from their families.

The proposal later found a receptive ear in Trump, who launched his 2016 campaign demonizing Mexican migrants as drug dealers and rapists and made cracking down on immigration a signature issue.

Homan told The Atlantic he was inspired to propose the family separation idea after witnessing the aftermath of grisly trafficking and violence on the border.

“The goal wasn’t to traumatize,” he told the magazine. “The goal was to stop the madness, stop the death, stop the rape, stop the children dying, stop the cartels doing what they’re doing.”

Some things AP deemed marginal to their story? WTF and why?