Tom Moran: On deportations, America has changed its mind. That spells trouble for Trump.

Tom Homan, the man in charge of the Donald Trump’s mass deportations, has a warning for America: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The budget Trump signed turbo-charged Immigration and Customs Enforcement annual spending — expanding it from $8 billion a year to $28 billion — allowing ICE to hire as many as 10,000 more agents, and to build a fleet of new detention centers across the country.

“You’re going to see enforcement on a level you’ve never seen it before,” Homan promises.

His priority target? Blue cities like New York and Chicago, where he says undocumented criminals create the greatest threat of violence.

“The big beautiful bill is going to give us 100,000 beds, so we can be more aggressive in finding public safety threats, and national security threats,” Homan told Politico week. “We’ll have more boots on the ground. . . We’re going to send many more agents into sanctuary cities – not because they are blue, this is not a political thing – but because we know we have a problem there.”

THE GRAND IRONY

It’s not a political thing? Maybe that’s true for Homan, a career ICE guy, a hard-charger who says he brushes off death threats every day. He says he’ll “feel good” only when every last “illegal alien” is gone. The man is on a mission.

But Trump has spun political gold from this issue since the day he descended that golden escalator 10 years ago and promised a crackdown. Now, he’s fulfilling that promise.

The grand irony is that his success at bringing order to the border has soothed Americans’ anxieties about illegal immigration, killing the appetite for mass deportations and turning most Americans against Trump on his core issue,

a recent Gallup poll found.

There are no caravans heading to El Paso these days, no waves of refugees crossing the Rio Grande, no busloads of bewildered Venezuelans arriving in Manhattan in the middle of the night. You may not like his methods, but Trump has created order at the border.

The Gallup poll shows how that success has drained all the mojo from his favorite wedge issue.

Among its findings:

• 
  Only 38 percent of Americans favor the deportation campaign that Homan is promising to escalate, and only 30 percent want immigration reduced.
  
• 
  79 percent consider immigration a “good thing for the country” on the whole. And 78 percent want to establish a path to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants living in the country today.
  
• 
  62 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, including 69 percent of independent voters.
  

“The surge in illegal border crossings during the Biden administration triggered heightened public concern about immigration and increased demand for stricter enforcement,” Gallup concludes. “The Trump administration’s swift and visible response appears to have defused that concern.”

I suspect it’s not just the border – it’s the fraud and cruelty behind the deportations. It’s one thing to block people at the border. It’s quite another to raid a Home Depot parking lot and arrest decent people who have been here for years mowing our lawns, building our homes and taking care of our kids.

Homan pitches this as a public safety issue, and that’s just dishonest. Two-thirds of those in ICE detention have no criminal records. And most of those with a record did not commit violent crimes. In all, just 7 percent of ICE detainees are violent criminals, according to ICE d

ata analyzed by the conservative Cato Institute.

By all means, get rid of that 7 percent. But let’s not slime the other 93 percent.

MACHO MEN AND MACHINE GUNS

ICE’s macho tactics also turn a lot of stomachs. At MacArthur Park, in a Latino section of Los Angeles, dozens of federal officers conducted a sweep earlier this month, some on horseback, and some in armored cars with mounted machine guns, sending kids and their parents scrambling. Even Rambo would consider that over the top.

In another incident in Los Angeles, masked ICE officers were

recorded on video punching

Narciso Barranco, the father of three U.S. Marines after they took him to the ground. He was undocumented, but has lived in the country for decades, has no criminal record, and raised his boys as patriots. “Hey, why are you hitting him?” a horrified bystander can be heard asking.

His Marine veteran son, 25-year-old Alejandro Barranco, voiced a concern many share: “The administration said they were going after criminals. And from what we’ve seen, I think it’s the complete opposite. I think the majority . . . are hard-working people who have been here for decades, providing for their family and providing for this country.”

MASKING ACCOUNTABILITY

And why do ICE agents wear those masks? A basic tenet of policing in America is that cops identify themselves with a badge and name tag, so that if they do something wrong, like beat a handcuffed suspect, they can be held accountable.

Homan says the masks are necessary because assaults on ICE officers are “up 700 percent” since the start of the year. What he doesn’t say is that the

79 assaults on ICE officers in the first half of this year, up from 10 during the same period last year

is a small number, compared to what the regular beat cop faces. Police in New York City reported 970 assaults against uniformed officers during the same stretch.

At this point, the die is cast. Homan seems like a man who is ready to bang his head through a brick wall, and what we’re seeing in Los Angeles is about to go national. Try to imagine armored cars with machine guns patrolling Central Park in New York City, or masked agents with automatic weapons raiding Home Depot parking lots in Chicago.

This is going to be ugly, and most Americans won’t like what they see. Who knew that Trump’s success at the border might come back and bite him before the mid-terms?

Moran is a national political columnist for Advance Local and the former editorial page editor/columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be emailed at aquinas1222@gmail.com.

About The Author