Watch: Ex-acting ICE director calls for mass arrests and a government shutdown over the southern border

Former Acting Director of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan called for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in an appearance on Fox News following a visit to the border shared with Mexico by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) on Tuesday afternoon.

During his impromptu trip, McCarthy demanded that Mayorkas resign and threatened congressional investigations if he does not.

“His actions have produced the greatest wave of illegal immigration in recorded history. Our country may never recover from Secretary Mayorkas’s dereliction of duty,” McCarthy said of Mayorkas. “This is why today I am calling on the Secretary to resign. He cannot and must not remain in that position."

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Homan – whom the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on Tuesday is "collaborating with an anti-Muslim hate group on a new project aimed at fearmongering" about the southern border – put forth a recommendation to anchor John Roberts that exuded the characteristics of a phishing expedition.

Roberts:

Alright, let's get more on this. Let's bring in Tom Homan, former acting ICE director and a Fox News contributor. Just riff on that last point for us, if you would, Tom, and in order to identify and solve a problem, do you have to look at it firsthand, or can you look at it from afar?

Homan:

Look, I think — I think McCarthy said the right thing. You need to have hearings, right? What I didn't hear is the word impeachment. That needs to happen for Alejandro Mayorkas. But if they're going to have oversight hearings, and I can tell you, it's going to be damaging. You know, if they subpoena the right people, subpoena the right information, there's a lot of damning information that's going to come out of this that's going to force either the resignation or impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas. This administration has done nothing to enforce the law on the border, and oversight hearings will prove that. Now I will add this one thing. I'm glad McCarthy is going to the border along with other teammates. However, it can't be a dog and pony show. They need to go back to DC and take action. Now they control the House. They control the purse strings. They need to do something and go beyond just the border. They also need to look at interior enforcement ICE. Do not pass the omnibus bill. The omnibus bill drops ICE detention by twenty-five percent. You can't take the ICE beds away in the middle of historic border crisis. So they need to look at the border and interior enforcement and what the secretary has done to destroy both.

Roberts:

I want to jump ahead to call for number three here, and to the point that you made just a second ago. Even some Democrats say that the White House is not getting it on this. Karen Tumulty from 'The Washington Post' did an interview with Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona. She said, 'do you think Democrats nationally have recognized the complexity of the issue and the frustrations that people have?' Kelly said absolutely not, not even close. Kelly went on to say though, that he thinks that Republicans just want this as an issue, that they don't want to do anything about it. You just said a second ago that you think the Republicans need to come back to Washington and really dig in and work on this. Question for you, though. Even if they did make that decision to do it, given the make-up of Congress and the fact that there is a Democrat in the White House, is anything going to get done?

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Homan suggested carrying out mass arrests. And if that fails to deter people from coming to the US, Republicans should shut down the government:

Well, look, the oversight hearing is taking control of the purse strings. If this administration refuses to do one thing to slow the flow, if they don't take this national security crisis seriously and try to secure that border, and start by detaining people. Detain people, releasing people just brings more. If they don't do that, then shut it down. The Republicans can threaten to shut the government down. A lot of people say well, Tom, you know, that's pretty drastic.

Homan then falsely claimed that the primary source of fentanyl trafficking is foreign nationals sneaking it across the border. According to the US Sentencing Commission, 81.6 percent of apprehended offenders have been American citizens.

Homan also implied without evidence that huge numbers of immigrants are terrorists:

We've got over a hundred thousand Americans dying from drug overdoses of drugs coming across that border according to DEA. You got fourteen hundred migrants have died on U.S. soil. You got one-hundred-sixteen known or suspected terrorists arrested trying to come into this country illegally. They got one million got-aways. How many of them are known suspected terrorists? At what point is it drastic enough to take that kind of action. I think we're there now.

Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.