Trump Wasn’t Kidding With That Fascist Rally. Just Ask His ICE Chief.
Much has been written about the racist bombast of Trump’s Sunday night rally, a spectacle evoking Hitler’s rallies of the 1930s, priming Germany and the world for mass deportation and genocide. Predictably, Trump’s close adviser Stephen Miller praised Trump onstage and reiterated his promise to forcibly remove millions of immigrants from the United States—“Who is gonna stand up and say, the cartels are gone! The criminal migrants are gone! The gangs are gone! America is for Americans and Americans only!” But just a few hours later, Trump’s pick to lead immigration enforcement, Tom Homan, could be seen purveying the same violent rhetoric in a 60 Minutes interview, just at a lower volume.
Homan has rightly begun getting more attention as Election Day nears. As Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was just as responsible for the policy of family separation as Miller, its more widely recognized architect. He has worked as a sort of Trump ICE director in exile over the last four years, making frequent appearances on Fox spreading unfounded claims of an “invasion” by immigrants crossing the southern border, and promoting his own leadership through his group Border911. The organization tours the country, backed by dark-money donors, purveying misinformation about immigration and immigrants. Their motto says it all: “The border is our theater of war.” Homan views himself as having had what amounts to a combat experience when facing immigrants. “I know what it’s like to arrest an alien and feel bad about it,” Homan said in a 2018 profile. “I know what it’s like to see a dead alien on the trail.” This is how he sells his credibility.
Homan has spent the last few months on a mass deportations promotional tour, culminating at the Republican National Convention, representing Trump’s plans on the main stage. His 60 Minutes repeat performance Sunday night was probably meant to sound reasonable. His answers tried to dodge the specifics of what mass deportations would entail, as other Trump surrogates have. But he ended up offering a kind of forecast, making several excuses a Trump administration would also likely use to justify mass deportation. It was a useful warning for the rest of us, not quite a mask-off moment but more than a glimpse behind it.
“It’s not gonna be a mass sweep of neighborhoods; it’s not going to be building concentration camps,” Homan insisted to 60 Minutes’ Cecila Vega, closing with a routine dig at what the media has said about these plans. “I’ve read it all, it’s ridiculous.” Homan said he would prefer to describe mass deportations as “targeted arrests.” Later, he protested when Vega asked him why Stephen Miller said mass deportations would involve large-scale raids. “I don’t use the term ‘raids,’ replied Homan. “You’re probably talking about workplace enforcement operations”—in which ICE descends unannounced on a worksite, making mass arrests.
Vega pushed back: “That’s a roundup.” Homan offered no real reply, other than to fall back on another Trump trope: “That’s where we find a lot of trafficking cases,” Homan said. When Homan ran out of preferred terms meant to make mass deportation sound more bureaucratic, he instead claimed some more noble purpose than merely deporting people: Immigration enforcement raids are also about rescuing “women and children,” he claimed, “forced into labor to pay off their smuggling fees.” (This is misleading: Raids can worsen treatment of immigrant workers, as research from the National Immigration Law Center has shown—employers have used the threat of calling ICE to exert control over immigrant workers.)
It’s hard to take anything about “fighting trafficking” seriously from anyone who worked in the Trump administration. Under Trump, survivors of trafficking were often invoked to justify immigration crackdowns. Yet immigrant survivors were not only denied help, such as special visas; some were even targeted by ICE. Years of MAGA world’s embrace of the sex-trafficking conspiracy theory cult QAnon have not helped, either. (It’s also a small MAGA world: Homan’s group Border911 began as a part of the America Project, a group co-founded by Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser who himself took the QAnon oath.)
The more durable propaganda for mass deportations, though, is the figure of the “illegal immigrant” and the “criminal alien,” a regular feature of Trump rallies, of Stephen Miller’s most damaging rhetoric, and of Tom Homan’s seemingly more presentable pitch.
Trump’s and Miller’s rhetoric revives salacious and violent narratives of white supremacy—from the anti-Black rape myths of Birth of a Nation to the apocalyptic novel Miller has promoted, The Camp of the Saints, in which invading immigrants overrun a white nation, using rape as a weapon. At Madison Square Garden, Miller told the crowd that they had “the right to live in a country where criminal gangs cannot just cross our border and rape and murder with impunity.” Threatening rape has been the centerpiece of Trump’s presidential pitch since 2015, with his comments about Mexican immigrants (“They’re rapists”). The Trump campaign’s anti-immigrant narrative has only became more saturated with horror and racism. Such narratives have also been part and parcel of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, as voiced not only by white supremacist mass shooters but by Trump’s running mate. As Miller continued at the rally, “Think how corrupt and hateful and evil a system is that allows gangs to come into this country and rape and murder little girls—I’m not just saying that, you’ve read the stories, it happens every day.” This conspiracy theory tells whites that they are losing their power to nonwhites, whether through immigrant voters “replacing” white voters or immigrants “replacing” white children by raping white women. “Who is gonna to stand up for our daughters?” Miller thundered on. “Who is gonna stand up for the girls of America, the women of America, the families of America?”
Homan’s pitch for mass deportations, perhaps, is meant to sound more reasonable, even if he and Miller would ultimately be working from the same plan. He has argued mass deportations are necessary to protect the American people and American sovereignty, both of which Homan has portrayed as imperiled, much like the innocents in Miller’s stories. At the Heritage Foundation’s “policy fest” at the RNC in July, Homan exuberantly proclaimed that as he envisioned mass deportation, “No one’s off the table. The bottom line is: Every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It’s a crime to enter this country illegally.” (Homan is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the group now most known for having shepherded Project 2025 into infamy.) The “criminal migrants” of Trump and Miller, the invading rapists they conjure up, can be contained by Homan’s far more expansive “illegal alien”—who is a criminal no matter what they’ve done or haven’t done.
Homan did not quite go there in his 60 Minutes interview. He tried to draw a brighter line. “If I am in charge of this, my priorities are public safety threats and national security threats first,” he told Vega, the reporter. “First implies others follow,” she pressed. Homan quickly replied, “Absolutely.” What if other people get caught up in the raids—an undocumented grandmother, Vega asked, would she be deported? Homan’s answer was that she might. “Let the judge decide,” he said. “We’re going to remove people that the judge has ordered deported.” (Of course, immigration officers do not limit themselves during raids to only those people a judge has already ordered deported, and those people aren’t going to wind up in front of a judge unless they’re first arrested and detained, per Homan’s orders.) “Is there a way to carry out mass deportations without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.” If undocumented parents would be forced to abandon their child born in the United States, he said, they “created that crisis.”
Homan has tried to present mass deportation like some faceless process that just gets set into motion, not as a series of decisions people make and through which he would exercise power. As Homan had said before, No one’s off the table. Miller’s propaganda from the Madison Square Garden stage on Sunday night may sound uglier, but Homan’s stems from the same logic: Whatever they do, however repressive, unlawful, or destructive, it’s not their responsibility. He means it to sound reasonable, inevitable. But instead, what he’s confirming is that every hateful word spewed at Trump’s fascist rally is in earnest—with a policy proposal to back it up.