“Tell you what it won’t be first,” Homan said. “It will not be a mass sweep of the neighborhoods. It will not be the construction of concentration camps. I read the whole thing, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he claimed, there would be “targeted arrests”. But as I did reported before, this is quite different from the actual plans that Trump adviser Stephen Miller has publicly presented:

Asked by radio show hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton how the mass deportation project would be accomplished, Miller said said would require a “shift to non-discriminatory or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller described going to any place where there are known congregations of “illegals” and taking people into federal custody.

To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive detention facilities that could house 50,000 to 70,000 people at any one time. Such a commitment, he said, “would be bigger than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”

In an exercise in semantics, Homan went on to say that he was not using the term “raids” but that “law enforcement operations at the workplace” would be necessary. When Vega pressed him on how the agency would prioritize immigration enforcement against threats to national security and public safety, he left no doubt that anyone entering the United States illegally would be a potential target. “So you’re doing a law enforcement operation,” Vega said, “Grandma’s in the house. It is undocumented. Is she under arrest too?”

“It depends,” Homan said. “Let the (immigration) judges decide. We will remove the people the judges order to be deported.”

As a retired government official, Homan did rounds of the conservative media to declare an “invasion” on the southern border. And he made an enterprise out of it by release Nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc. and travels around the country spreading fear-mongering messages about migrants.

When asked 60 minutes As for how many people would be deported in Trump’s proposed mass deportation operation, Homan said “you can’t answer that question” because it would depend on how many enforcement agents he would have. ICE currently has approximately 6,000 deportation officers. Arresting and removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, most of whom have been in the country for more than a decade, would require engagement hundreds of thousands of government employees.

“If there’s no note, if there’s no plan, is it completely ripe?” Vega asked.

“We’ve done it before,” Homan said, presumably referring to less successful The militaristic “Operation Wetback” insulted by the Eisenhower administration, which Trump has repeatedly invoked as a model. But the historians agree that campaign not only resulted in far fewer deportations than the federal government claimed, but also caught American citizens.

A mass deportation on the scale Trump and Homan are proposing would likely have the same result. And, as immigration experts have noted, such a plan would have a negative impact on mixed-status households, potentially tearing families apart. To that, Homan offered an alternative. “Is there a way to carry out a mass deportation without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”