Talking to David Bellavia at WBEN Radio in upstate New York, border czar Tom Homan discussed the work ICE agents are doing to pull dangerous people off the streets of American cities. And to keep the momentum going, he stressed the importance of Congress passing President Donald Trump's budget bill.
"So they're out there arresting bad guys every day, and with all the hate coming to them right now, I wish people would just go to the website, go to ICE.gov, and look at the number of people they've removed. There are public safety threats and national security threats. Every day, the men and women of ICE are making our community safer. Every day, every illegal alien criminal, they remove, makes our neighborhoods safer. And that's where people need to be concentrating."
In addition to ICE, Homan weighed in on the $46.5 billion big, beautiful budget bill that includes, in the Senate version, a $1,000 fee for each person seeking asylum. Homan said the bill needs to be passed quickly by Congress because his department is funded at 41,000 beds and has 56,000 in detention. "We need Congress to ... pass that bill so we can keep President Trump's promise to American people to keep that border secure and to run this deportation operation again, concentrating, prioritizing on public safety threats. That's exactly what we're doing," he said.
The big, beautiful bill includes almost $12 billion for ICE, which would give them the capacity to hold 115,000 people. Homan said it also increases the court liaisons, and 8,000 more ICE agents in general. Plus, it would buy drones and sensors for the border.
"Look, we got the most secure border in the history of this nation right now," the czar said. "And to make that permanent, we need to finish the job, right? So we got DOD down there, we've got other agencies down there trying to fill the gaps. But every place a border wall has been built, every place, illegal migration declined, illegal drug flow declined. What Joe Biden did is not only stop the construction of the wall, the wall that's already constructed, he stopped the technology being placed in that wall. Which did a lot of things. It would tell us if someone approaching the walls, someone's climbing the wall, someone's digging under the wall. It also allowed border patrol agents to communicate to one another."
He added that there are a lot of dead zones on the southern border where border patrol agent can't talk to one other, which is a huge officer security issue. So the big, beautiful bill is going to finish the technology "in the existing wall and the new wall."
"Big Bend National Park, the land, you just can't build a wall there so we need technology to do a virtual fence there so that we can capture traffic coming through there. The technology is also going to be used at the port of entries. We want legal trade. We want folks to come through the port with their goods. We want to legal trade, but to move that traffic faster, at the same time trying catch a contraband being smuggled. We need the latest technology to do that, and that's also going to add to that. So the technology on the border is well overdue. We've been begging for it for 20 years. So this big, beautiful bill gives them the technology to do that."
Speaking of technology, why would the Biden administration stop genetically testing adults with minors at the border?
"To move as many illegal aliens in this country as they could, again, because they foresee a future political play on this," Homan responded, adding, "Under Trump 45, we did DNA testing. And we did some pilot programs as high as, I think it was El Paso, we had a pilot program in El Pasco and found that one-third of the families weren't families. The person claiming to be the mother and father, no relative compared to DNA analysis. Now, what have we done now since Trump's back in power? We've reinstituted DNA across the board, and it's going to save children being trafficked in this country.
Homan said several large scale investigations were carried out that discovered children at the border, were "rented" by the cartels to unrelated male adults, female adults, to pose as a family. "Soon as they got across the border, got released, the child was sent back to be re-rented again. Who knows what hell these children went through" Homan said ? Now, since Trump's been back in office, we've found and rescued thousands of them, we're still looking for that. But I push for that, the biometric and the DNA testing hard in the beginning of this administration, because I know based on numerous investigations done by ICE, some of these children are in forced labor. Some of these children are forced sex slavery. And we're out there trying to save these children, out there, trying to locate them. And because of the missing biographic, biometric, and all this information, we can't find a lot of these children.
"Because you and I both, like you and got a footprint, right? We own homes, we own cars, we got credit cards. We can find you. But how do you find a child who don't have that digital footprint? We got to count on the digital footprint of the sponsor. And the last administration, they didn't vet these sponsors properly. They didn't do DNA testing. They didn't even fingerprint a lot. So we're out looking for a ghost, and that's what's making this job so hard. So that's why we're pushing so hard on this bill. This bill is gonna give us resources we need to find as many of these children as possible."