One of Trump’s most widely celebrated picks for his upcoming administration, at least amongst the MAGA base and political right, is his choice of former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Tom Homan to be his Border Czar.
Homan, a hardliner on illegal immigration, is expected to wage a massive deportation campaign and secure the southern border. Shortly before the election, toward the end of October, Homan appeared on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” program and made an epic comment about deportations that left the host stunned.
During that hilarious moment in the “60 Minutes” interview, interviewer Cecilia Vega pressed Homan on his deportation plans. She asked him, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Homan, without missing a beat, told her, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.” Vega was left slack-jawed by his response to her “gotcha” question about families.
For reference, that is an idea Homan has stuck with recently, saying families can self-deport together to avoid separation. He said, in a late-December NewsNation interview, “We’re not going to detain US citizen children, which means, you know, they’re going to be put in a halfway house, or they can stay at home and wait for the officers to get the travel arrangements and come back to get them.” He added, “The best thing to do is for the family to self-deport themselves. That makes it easier for the family. They can get their arrangements all together and they leave on their own behalf.”
In any case, Vega, when she recovered from her shock at Homan’s answer, pressed him on why children should be deported from the country in which they grew up. Unyielding and unrepentant, Homan told her, “Because their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally. So he created that crisis.”
Then, when Vega pressed him on if he wrote a report recommending family separation at the border, Homan told her, “Not true. I didn’t write the memorandum to separate families. I signed the memo. Why’d I sign the memo? I was hoping to save lives. While you and I are talking right now, a child’s going to die in the border. . . . So we thought, ‘so maybe if we prosecute people, they’ll stop coming.’”
Vega didn’t let the issue go. Pressing him yet again on the family separation matter, she asked if the upcoming administration plans on separating families. He told her, “I don’t know of any formal policy where they’re talking about family separations.” Then, when she asked if such a policy should be implemented, he told her, “It needs to be considered, absolutely.”
Watch Homan’s epic moment here: