Trump Wasn’t Kidding With That Fascist Rally. Just Ask His ICE Chief.

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.