Trump Border Czar Tom Homan Plans PR War over Migration and Repatriations

“A secure border saves lives, not just of our citizens, but of migrants themselves,” incoming border chief Tom Homan told Breitbart News.

That message must be broadcast widely because President-elect Donald Trump’s deputies must keep the trust of the American people as they enforce the nation’s popular migration laws, Homan said. “We will be very transparent,” Homan said, adding, “We’ll be sending a lot of information out every week on exactly what we’re doing, do a lot of videos, a lot of interviews. We need to control the narrative so we keep the trust of American people.”

Homan has a tough enemy. Pro-migration advocates have their own poll-tested narratives, and boatloads of cash, many advocacy groups, skewed polls, and media support to push their messages via many channels. “I think it’s really important to pin this [deportation fight] on Donald Trump” because he does not want to be blamed for the drama of deportations, said a leading advocate for more migration.

These pro-migration groups cite the economic gains from their Extraction Migration economic strategy — but they ignore the domestic economic losses, civic damage,  and national risks, and the vast civic damage done to the migrants’ home countries, such as Haiti and Nicaragua.

They raise alarms about separated families, crying mothers, border chaos, and military-style enforcement — but they ignore Americans’ civil right to secure borders, the many migration-caused crimes in the United States, as well as the migrants’ deaths, the child labor, and the migrants’ left-behind families.

“There’s never been a bigger separator of families than [Joe Biden’s border chief, Alejandro] Mayorkas,” said Jay Palmer, an expert in labor trafficking expert and former advisor to President Donald Trump. “What he did was he ripped [foreign] families apart, left the kids there and brought the men to the United States to work as cheap labor”:

Homan’s Message

“The American people need to hear the tragedy” of mass migration, Homan said.

Biden’s migration has killed thousands of migrants, Homan said, adding:

I was down in Texas last year, and I was with a sheriff. I was with him for four hours. We found two dead bodies. He told me he’s lucky to find 10 percent of the bodies because … the animals have taken them. They won’t find a lot of them who drowned in the river.

…

I stood on the back of a [smuggler’s] tractor trailer and 19 dead aliens that were baked to death, including a five year old little boy …  So if people wore my shoes for 34 years and seen the tragedies, the senseless deaths, that I’ve seen, they understand me that a secure border saves lives.

Many more migrants die on their way to the U.S. border, Homan said, adding, “The Darien Gap [in Panama] has thousands [of deaths] a year.”

Many more migrants are raped and sexually assaulted by the Democrats’ easy-migration policies, he said: “I talked to girls as young as nine that were raped multiple times by members of the cartels [that manage the migrant flow]. … Everything innocent, pure was ripped from her soul, she’ll never be the same, her life will never be the same.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been killed by drugs smuggled amid the chaos of mass migration, he said.

Aspiring nurse Laken Riley is just one of many Americans killed by the migrants who have been imported, housed, and transported by Democrat party officials and their allied nonprofit groups:

The enforcement-save-lives message has to be presented in several ways, Homan said. “Sometimes you’ve got to slow roll it, but other times, I think, the shock of it will move people.”

“We’re going to send out our message through various media outlets to let American people know about the children we save, about the victims of trafficking. … We want to tell that story.”

“We can’t count on newspapers,” Homan added.

North of the border, the repatriation process for migrants will be conducted carefully and humanely, he added.

“We have committed to this being a humane process,” he said:

This won’t be neighborhood sweeps. This is a targeted enforcement operation. We know exactly who we’re going to arrest before we leave office. … Every arrest we make has been approved by a supervisor. We know exactly who we’re looking for. We have a pretty good idea where we’re going to find them. They got to get approval to do it. So it’s going to be well, well-planned, humane operation.

Officials will start by focusing on the hundreds of thousands of migrants who are criminals and the roughly 1.3 million migrants who have used all their legal appeals, he said:

If a judge says, “No, you don’t qualify [for asylum]. You must go home,” then we must execute those orders, remove those people. If we don’t … [then] just abolish the immigration court because [judges] orders obviously don’t mean anything anymore.

Migrants know the law and often take many steps to evade enforcement, he said. So “if you come to this country illegally and you get an order of removal [from a judge], but you hide out, [and if] you decide to have a child that becomes a U.S. citizen, that’s on you,” he said. “Having a child in the United States does not give you amnesty.”

One migrant displayed his use of his infant as a shield against repatriation:

“He can’t hold this country hostage,” Homan said when Breitbart cited the video and added, “The bottom line is: He’s the one who broke the law, he put himself in that position, he put his child in that position … knowing he was in the country illegally, knowing that he had an order for deportation.”

Homan’s message is applauded by immigration reformers.

By first repatriating criminals and migrants who have been ordered home, it will be a “long, long time before you start getting to the people who might evoke sympathy,” said Ira Mehlman, the spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, adding:

We didn’t get into this overnight. We’re not going to get out of it tomorrow. It is going to be a process, a long process, and you just go after it in some kind of rational way that sends a signal that we are not going to tolerate this anymore.

Once in power, Trump’s deputies will be able to lift the lid on the many semi-secret scandals and disasters created by Biden’s migration deputies.

The exposure of the abuse and harm done to migrants, to U.S. blue-collar families, and to U.S. college graduates by the investor-led progressives may temporarily deflate many progressives’ claims of moral superiority:

Anti-Enforcement Narratives

Trump’s enforcement campaign — and Homan’s good-cop narrative — will face a lavishly funded, sophisticated, and emotional PR campaign of emotional attack ads and counter-narratives.

Much of the elite pushback will be conducted by eager reporters and social media managers. Many prefer to see themselves as progressive champions for vulnerable migrants and innocent children against powerful “racists” and mean “xenophobes.”

But their pushback is being guided by the West Coast investors at Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, which has been closely allied with Mayorkas since at least 2020.

The FWD.us group was formed in 2013 by Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy West Coast consumer-economy investors. The investors gain roughly $20 in stock value for every extra $1 earned in profit when the government extracts welfare-aided consumers, apartment-sharing renters, and low-wage workers from poor countries.

Those consumer-economy investors fund many progressive groups in Washington, DC, and around the nation. This Astroturf Empire distracts politicians, officials, judges, and the media from recognizing the huge economic impact caused by the investors’ policy of extracting more consumers, renters, and workers from poor countries.

The network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats not to talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated and steered coverage by the TV networks and the print media.

The result is that many progressives and media people stay silent about migration’s civic and economic damage. For example, migration inflates the cost of housing, deflates both salaries and wages, reduces automation and productivity, and gives C-Suite executives more power over professionals.

These investor groups developed many of their major poll-tested narrative themes during the first Trump administration.

Those themes frame the repatriation issue as the hate-driven, chaotic, and wasteful infliction of pain on children and families — but not the rational, popular, decent, and legitimate defense of a nation’s citizens from a mass inflow of poor foreign workers and their dependents.

Rolling Stone parroted the corporate narrative on November 19:

In the corner of the center, one young Haitian girl was flipping through a children’s book and playing with a small, blonde doll. She wasn’t bothering anyone or hurting anyone in any way. Yet, she is, to the President Trumps of the world, a quintessential example of someone who should be easily demagogued for electoral gain, rounded up, and purged from our country.

These talking points portray the enforcement of immigration laws as fueled by irrational and chaotic personal bigotry.

“Cruelty is the point,” says Douglas Rivlin, the spokesman for America’s Voice, which is backed by the FWD.us investor group, said.

“The Trump team [will] implement anti-immigrant policies,” not enforcement of immigration laws,  Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told ABC News.

Democrats wrap their pro-migration policies in family values rhetoric and imagery of military-style enforcement.

Under Trump, “taxpayer dollars could be used to fund deportation flights that would tear apart … families, but also our communities,” said Eva Bitran, director of immigrants’ rights at the ACLU in Southern California.

“They’re talking about rounding up people who are law-abiding, undocumented immigrants in this country, many of whom are working, paying taxes [to state and local governments],” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker told MSNBC.

Pro-migration advocates are also expanding the definition of families to include distant relatives, citizen families with migrant relatives, and unrelated migrants living in the same apartment or house. “Mass deportation is family separation by another name,” NBC journalist Jacob Soboroff said on November 19, adding: “It’s not separating [parents from] children at the border  … [it is separating illegal-migrant] parents from the [US-born] children and the children from their schools in the interior.”

His comment came at a November 19 screening of a Hollywood-produced documentary about border security, which was supported and promoted by FWD.us. The documentary explained how advocates used the “kids in cages” and “family separation” themes to create a media uproar that pressured Trump to end “zero tolerance” border enforcement in June 2018.

The D.C. audience consisted largely of pro-migration activists, most of whom were older women eager to embrace the FWD.us narrative about cruel treatment of migrant families. One woman shouted:

They got away with this one time. We’re not going to let him [Trump] do it again. We’re not going to let him make our federal government the Third Reich of the US. We’re not going to let them make our National Guard the Gestapo [Nazi secret police] of the U.S. We are not going to let that happen. They want to send out National Guards … We’ll bring their fathers, their mothers, their teachers, and they’ll have to look them in the eye before they take these [migrants] people out of their home.

“Thank you for speaking out — it is what everybody feels,” responded Jen Psaki, an MSNBC host at the event. “Your spirit, I hope, is what many, many people have.”

But Psaki also admitted that the public is backing Trump: “If you look at polling, which is imperfect, there is a large percentage of the American public who is concerned about border security, concerned about security in their communities.”

The FWD.us narrative also includes threats against Americans’ economy and pocketbooks.

The repatriation of migrants will cause inflation and economic harm to Americans, insist Democrat-aligned economists. Axios.com posted a laundry list of employers’ objections under the headline “The industries that could be hardest hit by Trump’s immigration crackdown.” But these threats of economic turmoil ignore the gains for low-wage Americans — higher wages, cheaper housing, more high-tech investment, and more cooperative employers.

The themes of military-style enforcement, cruelty, economic turmoil, and crying children, are wrapped together by the primary theme of “chaos.”

“Mass exclusion … feeds chaos at the border,” economist Michael Clemens claimed.

“It will cause chaos, and that will be bad for local law enforcement to have that type of chaos, where people are afraid to go to their local police officers. … that’s what causes anarchy in societies,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, told CNN on November 18.

“There’s a lot of people who are committed to spurring chaos for their own means,” Todd Schulte, the president of Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobby, told the theater audience.

“I think a lot on that question of chaos,” said Shulte as he urged the audience of shabbily dressed progressives to blame Trump, not his deputies such as Homan and Stephen Miller:

I think it’s really important to pin this on Donald Trump … it is actually really important to me that he is the person who feels the pressure when he does things well, and he is the person for when he tried to end DACA, there was this huge blowback from [young illegal migrants] “dreamers” to the Pope to the CEOs. And he said, “Oh no, no, no, Congress should act!” …

He got pinned into a corner … he was eating shit politically for this. I don’t believe he was doing this because he thought it was the right thing in his heart. And that, to me, is a really important lesson for those of us on the outside

But he admitted, “I do think that where we are heading is really hard, and it’s going to be really challenging.”