November 12, 2024 - 11:50am
While Donald Trump’s most eye-catching appointment may be Marco Rubio, who is strongly tipped to become the next secretary of state, some of his other hires are just as revealing about the direction his presidency will take. Reports that Stephen Miller will serve as deputy chief of staff for policy in the next administration, and the announcement that Tom Homan will be the new “border czar”, reveal two things about a second Trump White House. Firstly, that the incoming president is recruiting from a deeper populist bench this time around; and secondly, that he is placing immigration policy at the centre of his political vision.
Miller is a pioneering figure in contemporary Republican populism. In his years as a staffer for former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, he developed a reputation as the consummate border hawk. Miller hopped aboard the Trump train early in the latter’s 2016 presidential run, then became one of his closest advisors and helped push the administration towards taking a maximalist approach to immigration enforcement.
Now, Miller will be returning to the White House with an expanded policy portfolio. As deputy chief of staff for policy, he will have considerable influence in crafting the Trump agenda. Miller’s years of experience in immigration policy have given him an impressive command of the labyrinth of US immigration law and regulations, and the fact that he has been appointed to this position shows the centrality of border control for the Trump administration’s opening act.
Meanwhile, with years of service as a police officer and a Border Patrol agent, Homan climbed the ladder at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As acting head of ICE during Trump’s first term, Homan was a staunch defender of border controls, and has been a regular critic of Joe Biden’s lax immigration policies. During a speech at a National Conservatism conference in July, he praised Trump for taking strong executive actions on the border and ended with a promise: if the ex-president won in 2024, Homan would be there with him to “run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen”.
Echoing this pledge, Trump’s announcement of Homan’s appointment not only said that he would be “in charge” of the US border, but also tasked the former ICE chief with “all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin”.
Eight years ago, Trump’s transition team sometimes struggled to identify personnel who were in line with the president’s populist vision of politics, especially at the upper levels of the administration. This time around, he can draw on a bigger well of people tested by his first four years in office.
The Miller and Homan picks also indicate that Trump’s team may be readying itself for a fierce battle over immigration policy once he returns to office. Democrats are already mobilising legal, legislative, and executive efforts to resist a border crackdown. In a recent cable news appearance, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey pledged to block the state police from cooperating with deportation efforts, and said that she would use “every tool in the toolbox” to oppose Trump’s actions. Speaking to Fox News after his appointment was announced, Homan pledged to continue regardless of opposition from Democrats: “We’re gonna do the job without you or with you.”
The coordinated detonation of border controls and the ensuing migration crisis during the Biden presidency reveal how much sway executive-branch decisions can hold over immigration policy. There are many steps the Trump White House can take at the presidential level to reverse Biden’s policies — from tearing up memos exempting wide swathes of unauthorised migrants from deportation to tightening the asylum process — and it will need to show results on this front. The breakdown at the border was a constant reminder of the fundamental failure of state capacity under Biden. Restoring order to the immigration system was a central promise of Trump’s 2024 campaign — and it will be an early test of his new administration.
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SubscribeThe screaming and moaning of illegals and their allies has just begun. But they will be deported. Trump will start with criminals – there are hundreds of thousands of those in the US. One difficulty will be determining where to send these criminals to, since many destroy identity documents after arrival to the US. My thought is simply to drop them at the Mexican border and force them across the Rio Grande. Some will drown, but most will arrive in Mexico. Mexico has not dealt with the consequences of it’s laissez-faire policy about illegals. The key to long-term solution is to force Mexico to control its own borders, by putting the burden of the illegals scum on Mexico.
Let’s see if they actually do move beyond rhetoric when given the chance. Biden’s administration deported the same numbers as Trump’s first term. Already it seems Homan is watering down going after known criminals as the no.1 priority, which it was under Biden, for a wider casting of the net. Err why?
‘Rhetoric well out ahead of the Reality – The Sequel’, surely not? And yet didn’t Trumpster talk about a Wall once?
The language used will suffice for now especially as the supporting crowd feels vindicated and revels in this dog whistle stuff. But demonising not the same as effective policy implementation. Let’s see what money he identifies for the task and where he takes it from too. 11-15m deported people ain’t gonna happen without large price tag and it won’t be the rich paying
‘Biden’s administration deported the same numbers as Trump’s first term.’
But how many did Biden let in, against the number that came in illegally during Trump’s first term?
Democrats are already mobilising legal, legislative, and executive efforts to resist a border crackdown.
in case anyone wonders how Dems lost, that line sums it up. The party is absolutely tone deaf to voices outside of its echo chamber. It has convinced itself that it is the voice of truth, effectively making everyone else a liar if not illegitimate.
There can be little doubt that Democratic officials, Judges and lawyers fired up with a sense of moral righteousness will do all they can to resist Trump’s various border policies and there will be a thicket of laws and regulations that require repeal to stop his policies being negated in practice.
Just as efforts to stem the tide of illegal immigration into Europe have come up against multiple legal hurdles so will Democratic State officials and Judges do their utmost to thwart the popular immigration policies advocated by Trump.
The reality is that the 10 million plus population of undocumented people in the US runs the gamut from recently arrived migrants crowded into shelters to people who have lived here for decades and are for all intents and purposes Americans, notwithstanding their lack of legal status, and who have families, homes, jobs, etc. that tie them into local communities. Moving to deport recent migrants will not likely cause outrage, though it remains to be seen whether the US actually has the capacity to make that happen on a non-symbolic scale. Moving to uproot people from well-established places will produce scenes that even many Trump voters will find distasteful and perhaps even unacceptably cruel. If the former can be accomplished along with a serious reduction in unauthorized border crossings, that may be enough for most voters and could permit the administration to declare mission accomplished without having to get really nasty. We’ll see.
The Democrats’ wholesale failure to address this issue with a reasonable and realistic policy has given Republicans an chance to put into effect a much harsher vision. As an American, I am interested to see both whether they will actually try to put mass deportation into effect and how much of that my countrymen and women are really up for.
It continues to baffle me about why/how “journalists” constantly refer to policies as being “populist” when they are merely enforcing existing law. If the incoming Trump administration simply deports the 1.3 million illegal aliens who committed a crime while in the U.S., it would be the largest deportation in American history. Why any public official anywhere would halt that process is beyond reason or sanity.
If you doubt it, here is the link to an article that shares the details: The Case for Mass Deportations
I don’t know. The logic seems clear enough to me. Enforcing the law is a populist position because it is supported by the people, especially the lower classes against their social superiors, whose education confers upon them a clearer judgement and a better understanding of the world and what is ‘right’, what is ‘acceptable, and what is unacceptable. Clearly not enforcing the law is the correct position while enforcing it is populist agitation. What’s not to get? *sarcasm off*
“Democrats are already mobilising legal, legislative, and executive efforts to resist…”
They tried that for the last eight years and lost bigly.