Workplace Raids

Plus: Land acknowledgements, New York's migrant expenditures, and more...

Donald Trump's border czar: Thomas D. Homan will serve as the incoming administration's new handler of immigration and the southern border. The former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin," the president-elect wrote on Truth Social.

Homan, throughout his time at ICE in 2017 and 2018, was a chief architect of the family separation policy, which involved separating children and parents who had crossed the border together so that parents could be criminally prosecuted. In 2018, Homan said the Department of Justice ought "to file charges against the sanctuary cities" and "hold back their funding."

When 60 Minutes' Cecilia Vega told Homan last month that one estimate "says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year," Homan replied: "I don't know if that's accurate or not."

"Is that what American taxpayers should expect?" continued Vega.

"What price do you put on our national security? Is that worth it?" responded Homan.

"Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?" pressed Vega.

"Of course there is," responded Homan. "Families can be deported together."

Homan last year defended the old family separation policy by declaring that actually families "chose to separate themselves" when they violated the law.

This new round of mass deportations will be a "humane operation," Homan claimed on Fox News yesterday. "It's going to be a well-targeted, planned operation conducted by the men of ICE. The men and women of ICE do this daily. They're good at it." Given Homan's defense of the family separations the first time around, it's not clear what he considers to be "humane" or whether that is out of step with the American public.

"You concentrate on the public safety threats and the national security threats first," Homan told Fox, claiming that many terrorists slipped into the country under President Joe Biden. This emphasis on violent criminals (some of whom have surely been let in, but are relatively few in number) is an attempt to whitewash what is actually planned for Trump's second term: workplace raids for low-wage workers whose only crime is simply crossing into the country in the first place, who have in many cases tried to pursue legal pathways to firm up their status but have few options available.

This type of raid has not happened under the Biden administration, but Homan says they will resume after January 20, when Trump returns to office.

Such crackdowns—like the 2018 raids that targeted meat processing plants in Ohio or the 2019 wave targeting chicken processing plants in rural Mississippi—can throw entire communities into disarray, screwing up their economies and leaving tons of vacant job openings at the workplaces ransacked by immigration enforcers.

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Scenes from New York: Relevant to the above, but a bit of a New York tangent.

"President [Donald] Trump's [deportation] plan is going to be a cost savings for the American people," Tom Homan told Fox. "Because this administration is paying for free airline tickets all over the country, free hotel rooms at $500 bucks a night, free education, free medical care, and that's in perpetuity…they're paying $500 bucks a night for a hotel room in New York City, meanwhile there's empty ICE beds at $127 dollars a night! So President Trump's plan is going to save taxpayers money over time."

Homan's numbers are exaggerated, but the point is at least partly fair. The budgetary commitments get more disturbing the deeper you dig: The city comptroller's office reports, as of last year, that the city Department of Homeless Services (which also handles asylum seekers awaiting court dates) is contracting with some three dozen hotels, being paid daily rates of $55–$385 per day. Our mayor, Eric Adams, has started a "reticketing" program, in which migrants may request one-way plane tickets, either domestic and international, and have them paid for by taxpayers, as part of an initiative to get illegal immigrants—who are costly to taxpayers because of the city's right-to-shelter consent decree (which now terminates after 30 days)—out.

The governments of Texas and Florida are, of course, not fiscally innocent, having spent a fair chunk of change busing migrants to New York, Sacramento, Chicago, and Martha's Vineyard as stunts to get blue-state liberals to start shouldering some of the welfare cost.

The thing that's perhaps hardest to swallow about how much taxpayers have been forced to pay for: To what degree does this politically sabotage the case for increasing legal immigration quotas? When immigrants are seen as welfare mooches, not productive members of society and the workforce, there's surely more political will behind deportation squads.

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QUICK HITS

• I am very excited for the relaunch of Just Asking Questions. We're starting fresh on a separate YouTube channel, which you can subscribe to here. If you watch the show, you know the types of guests we have on: Glenn Greenwald, Stella Assange, Mary Katharine Ham, Dave Smith, Jesse Singal, Mike Solana, Ford Fischer, Nate Silver, Vivek Ramaswamy, Trent Horn, Bryan Johnson, Michael Moynihan, Bob Murphy, Kyla Scanlon. That cool dude from the Cajun Navy. Klaus Schwab's coauthor (lol) who I definitely pissed off. Over the next few months, we have a lot more big and unexpected guests planned, so it's worth subscribing since we're getting the boot from the main Reason YouTube channel!

we're relaunching our show, Just Asking Questions (cc @TheAbridgedZach) on a separate youtube channel. it's going to be bigger and better than before. subscribe. pic.twitter.com/zIrzgAnyX6

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) November 8, 2024

• Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat, just won re-election to her seat in a rural red district in Washington. She has some choice words for her own party: "The fundamental mistake people make is condescension. A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they're disrespecting people."
• "About a week after the September debate, Mr. Trump started spending heavily on a television ad that hammered Ms. Harris for her position on a seemingly obscure topic: the use of taxpayer funds to fund surgeries for transgender inmates. 'Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,' Ms. Harris said in a 2019 clip used in the ad," per The New York Times. "But the ad, with its vivid tagline — 'Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you'—broke through in Mr. Trump's testing to an extent that stunned some of his aides."
• "The incoming Trump administration would in theory be able to replace heads of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on day one, at least on an interim basis," reports Bloomberg. "Both of those officials are crucial to the process to propose and enact the new regulations, and banks are already seizing the moment to begin advocating for appointments seen as more friendly to the industry."
• Interesting:

Well then! Trump announces on Truth Social he will "not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation" pic.twitter.com/aKZuYd2yx9

— Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) November 9, 2024

• Call me cynical, but the land acknowledgements were never actually for Natives in the first place; they were a way of signaling to other upper-middle-class progressives.

Land acknowledgements from now on should acknowledge that Native Americans voted against the ppl who do land acknowledgements. https://t.co/UEE1g8EsVE

— Alice (@AliceFromQueens) November 11, 2024