'You better start packing': Trump’s former ICE chief at RNC vows to deport 'millions'
18 July 2024
As a sea of GOP delegates at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night waved pre-printed signs demanding “mass deportation now!” Tom Homan, who served as Donald Trump’s Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), promised in a second Trump administration he will deport “millions” of undocumented immigrants.
Homan, who in 2022 accepted a speaking invitation at a white supremacist conference organized by Nick Fuentes, at one point directed his remarks to the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
“I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden released in our country in violation of federal law. You better start packing now,” he warned as the GOP crowded erupted into loud cheers. “You’re damn right. ‘Cause you’re going home.”
Calling Trump – who has appeared with a large bandage on his ear after an assassination attempt Saturday – a “warrior” who’s “gonna make America safe again,” Homan then declared, “I got another message. Another message to the criminal cartels in Mexico.”
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“You’ve smuggled enough fentanyl across this country to kill 148,000 young Americans. You have killed more Americans than every terrorist organization in the world combined. and when President Trump is back in office he’s gonna designate you a terrorist organization and he’s gonna wipe you off the face of the earth.”
“You’re done. You’re done.”
The vast majority of fentanyl “overwhelmingly” is smuggled through official U.S. points of entry by U.S. citizens for U.S. citizens, according to the CATO Institute, which states clearly: “U.S. Citizens Are Fentanyl Traffickers.”
“Only two years ago,” HuffPost on Wednesday reported, “Homan was invited to speak at a much smaller event: the America First Political Action Conference, a white supremacist confab organized by Nick Fuentes, the head of the deeply racist and antisemitic ‘groyper’ movement. HuffPost first reported that Homan was scheduled to speak at the 2022 event, with Homan explaining that his assistant had arranged his appearance and that they may have confused Fuentes’ group with another right-wing group. In his telling, it was only when Homan was actually at AFPAC, sitting at a table preparing his remarks, that he decided to do a Google search for Fuentes’ name.”
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After doing some research at the event, Homan “got up and left” before it began.
HuffPost spoke with Homan at the time, and reported he “reiterat[ed] that he’s not racist. But a few minutes later, he called HuffPost to make a clarification. ‘I’m not saying this is a bad group,’ he said of Fuentes and the groypers. ‘I’m saying I don’t know.’ ”
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s massive 920-page blueprint, has been called “a scheme to put virtually unlimited power in the hands of an authoritarian president, with mass firings of civil servants and the elimination of an independent Justice Department. It would cement in place a far-right, Christian nationalist, ‘biblical’ worldview as the foundation for law and policy.”
It calls for mass deportations, according to The New York Times.
“Besides being cruel,” Washington Monthly reported in May, “deporting 11 million unauthorized immigrants would cause labor shortages and slash national wage and salary income, likely triggering a recession and reigniting inflation.”