MILWAUKEE — On Wednesday night, Thomas Homan, who oversaw former President Donald Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant regime as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, stepped onto the principle stage of the Republican Nationwide Conference and described immigrants as an existential menace to America.
“This isn’t mismanagement,” Homan mentioned of President Joe Biden’s border polices. “This isn’t incompetence. That is by design. It’s a selection. That is nationwide suicide!”
Trump not too long ago promised to rehire Homan if he retakes the White Home — one thing Homan described as inevitable.
“I’ve a message for the thousands and thousands of unlawful aliens who Joe Biden allowed to enter the nation in violation of federal regulation,” Homan mentioned. “Begin packing, since you’re going residence!”
The gang roared.
Solely two years in the past, Homan was invited to talk at a a lot smaller occasion: the America First Political Motion Convention, a white supremacist confab organized by Nick Fuentes, the pinnacle of the deeply racist and antisemitic “groyper” motion. HuffPost first reported that Homan was scheduled to talk on the 2022 occasion, with Homan explaining that his assistant had organized his look and that they might have confused Fuentes’ group with one other right-wing group. In his telling, it was solely when Homan was truly at AFPAC, sitting at a desk making ready his remarks, that he determined to do a Google seek for Fuentes’ identify.
Google shot again article after article labeling Fuentes a white nationalist, however Homan had been skeptical — he felt he knew what it was wish to unfairly be labeled a “racist.” Then he learn an article about Fuentes praising Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. That was a bridge too far for Homan. He acquired up and left earlier than the occasion started.
Afterward, HuffPost requested Homan if it involved him that somebody like Fuentes — an admirer of Adolf Hitler who marched alongside neo-Nazis on the lethal 2017 Unite the Proper rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — would need him to talk at his convention. He demurred, reiterating that he’s not racist. However a couple of minutes later, he known as HuffPost to make a clarification. “I’m not saying this can be a unhealthy group,” he mentioned of Fuentes and the groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know.”
Two years later, Homan is on the cusp of enacting anti-immigrant insurance policies that will thrill Fuentes and the groypers.
“Trump comes again in January. I’ll be on his heels coming again, and I’ll run the most important deportation drive this nation has ever seen,” he said earlier this month on the Nationwide Conservatism convention. “They ain’t seen shit but. Wait till 2025.”
Homan is listed as a contributor to Venture 2025, a blueprint for an authoritarian second Trump administration that was written largely by the Heritage Basis, the place he’s a visiting fellow. The 900-page doc requires mass deportations of all “immigration violators” — a imaginative and prescient of sweeping raids and separated households.
“We’re going to have a historic deportation operation, since you’ve acquired a historic, unlawful immigration, crossing the southern border,” Homan mentioned on the Nationwide Conservatism convention, later including: “Nobody’s off the desk. When you’re within the nation illegally, it’s not OK. When you’re within the nation illegally, you higher be wanting over your shoulder. … The underside line is: Each unlawful alien is a prison. They enter the nation in violation of federal regulation. It’s a criminal offense to enter this nation illegally.”
If Homan as soon as once more leads ICE, he’ll be serving beneath a president who has promised to deport 20 million individuals. Earlier this yr Trump mentioned these 20 million immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
It was language that echoed the phrases of one other far-right chief. “All nice cultures of the previous perished solely as a result of the initially artistic race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf.”
