Homan’s proposal for mass deportations is probably meant to sound more reasonable, even if he and Miller are ultimately working from the same plan. He argued that mass deportations were necessary to protect the American people and American sovereignty, both of which Homan described as being at risk, just like the innocents in Miller’s stories. At the Heritage Foundation’s “policy fest” at the RNC in July, Homan exuberant proclaim that while he envisioned a mass deportation, “No one is off the table. The bottom line is: every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It is a crime to enter this country illegally.” (Homan is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the group now best known for spearheading Project 2025 in infamy.) Trump and Miller’s “criminal immigrants,” the invading rapists they evoke, can be dwarfed by Homan’s far more expansive “illegal alien”—who is a criminal regardless of what they have or have not done.

Homan didn’t really go there in his
60 minutes interview. He tried to draw a brighter line. “If I’m in charge of this, my priorities are threats to public safety and threats to national security first,” he told Vega, the reporter. “First involve others follow,” she pressed. Homan quickly replied, “Absolutely.” What if other people are caught in the raids — would an undocumented grandmother, Vega asked, be deported? Homan’s response was that they could. “Let the judge decide,” he said. “We’re going to remove the people the judge has ordered deported.” (Of course, immigration officers don’t limit their raids to only those people a judge has already ordered deported, and those people won’t appear before a judge unless they’re first arrested and detained, according to 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 were forced to abandon their child born in the United States, he said, they “created that crisis.”

Homan tried to present mass deportation as a faceless process that was just being set in motion, not as a series of decisions that people made and through which they would exercise power. As Homan had said before, no one is off the table. Miller’s propaganda from the Madison Square Garden stage Sunday night may sound nastier, but Homan’s comes from the same logic: Whatever he does, no matter how repressive, illegal or destructive, it isn’t. their responsibility. He wants to sound reasonable, inevitable. But instead, what it confirms is that every hate speech spewed at Trump’s fascist rally is serious — with a policy proposal to back it up.