President-elect Donald Trump’s rapid-fire selections to run the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and oversee immigration policy foreshadow a domestic hardline that is likely to stretch from the border to interior immigrant communities across the country, top immigration reporters and a former Trump DHS official said.
“I think we have entered a different realm for homeland security and what’s to come,” Olivia Troye, a homeland security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, told the National Press Foundation’s Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship class.
Joined by New York Times reporter Hamed Aleaziz and CBS News correspondent Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Troye said the new administration would likely move quickly to enact “extreme measures” even more austere than Trump’s first term when the new president immediately sought to impose a far-reaching travel ban.
“I think it’ll be increased on a level because there is a dynamic here where people feel emboldened and empowered because they believe the will of the people is behind them.”
Trump’s announced intention to nominate South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as homeland secretary and Tom Homan, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director, to serve as “border czar” set the stage with staunch Trump allies who support some of the president-elect’s most extreme proposals.
Trump also selected Stephen Miller, an immigration opponent, to be his deputy chief of policy – a role that does not require congressional approval.
“The people that will be in charge of DHS were the people that were trying to be in charge the first time around who really butted heads with some of the leadership there, and those are the Stephen Millers and Tom Homans of the world,” Troye said. “They are the ones that are going to be running the department because it will be focused on immigration, and then [Noem] will be sort of the figurehead. But she is aligned.”
Trump has vowed to launch a mass deportation operation soon after he takes office.
“[Homan] is somebody who believes very strongly in the toughest immigration enforcement positions possible,” Aleaziz said. “He’s the one who’s going to make sure that the department does everything that President Trump wants on immigration. And that means deploying all the resources possible to not only deter people from coming into the country but to make sure that ICE and DHS have enough manpower to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants in the United States.”
Homan featured prominently in the first Trump administration’s family separation policy. Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic shared immigration coverage advice with the Paul Miller Class of 2022 before winning a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on that policy.
Following a bitter campaign in which Trump largely leveraged the broken immigration system to win a new term, Montoya-Galvez said immigration “will play an even larger role in our national discourse in the coming months and years.”
“I think we’re going to see more dramatic changes in the interior and when it comes to legal immigration,” Montoya-Galvez said, referring to Trump’s promise of the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
“They’re saying that they’re going to go after serious criminals and national security threats first, which is the Biden’s administration policy as it stands right now, but that they’re also going to go after people who are here illegally but have otherwise not committed any other crimes, which is a significant change from current policy,” Montoya-Galvez said.
Access the full transcript here. Quotes encouraged with attribution.
