Thomas Homan, who will be Donald Trump’s “Border Czar”. in the next administration, he rejected claims that the president-elect would remove American citizens in the planned mass deportation operation.

Talking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity On Monday, Homan, the former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director, said “exactly not” when asked about the comments from the view’S Ana Navarro. Co-host of ABC show t had saidBecause removing millions of people believed to be in the country illegally would also mean deporting family members who are legal citizens.

The president-elect has promised to implement the largest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in history. Homan had said CBS News’ 60 minutes in October that “families can be deported together” when the next Trump administration goes ahead with its illegal immigration plans. Navarro said: “What he is saying is that American citizens can be deported. What he’s saying is if the parent is undocumented and they have US citizen children or US citizen spouses and you don’t want to separate them, then let’s separate them. deport American citizens”.

Details are still unclear on exactly how he will perform broad proposal for mass deportation campaignas well as how much such an operation would cost. Trump said recently NBC News that his plans will have “no price tag.”

Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign team and ICE for comment via email.

During his time as ICE director under the Trump presidency, Homan oversaw“zero tolerance” immigration enforcement policy; which separated thousands of parents from their children at the southern border.

Homan denied that Trump’s mass deportation policy would result in legal U.S. citizens being removed along with their families and said only criminals and gang members should be concerned.

“Exactly not. viewit’s like the island of misfit toys; they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Homan told Hannity.

“President Trump has made it clear that we’re going to prioritize threats to public safety and threats to national security first. That’s what he’s going to focus on. There are over 1.5 million convicted criminal aliens in this country with removal orders that we will search, there are thousands of gang members we will search.

“If you’re in the country illegally, you shouldn’t be comfortable, absolutely not. I wouldn’t be comfortable if I was in another country illegally; you shouldn’t be comfortable either,” Homan added. “When you enter this country illegally, you have committed a crime. You are a criminal and you are not off the table”.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt previously said Newsweek which the president-elect would “do provisions for families with mixed status”.

“He will restore his effective immigration policies, implement new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal traffickers, and organize every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest operation to deport illegal criminals, drug traffickers and human traffickers. in American history,” Leavitt said.

Homan also said The fox and friends Monday that focusing on jobs and sex trafficking will be a way to implement Trump’s new deportation plans.

“Where do we find the most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking? At jobs,” Homan said.

Heidi Altman, director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center, said that approach is unlikely to help victims.

“He confuses traffickers with trafficked people,” Altman told The Hill. “Tom Homan is adept at using the rhetoric of public safety to justify vicious tactics that tear families apart.”

The American Immigration Council estimated in an October report that a one-time mass deportation of about 13 million illegal immigrants to the U.S. could cost at least $315 billion.

This figure also represents about 11 million people who, as of 2022, did not have permanent legal status, as well as about 2.3 million people who crossed the southern border illegally and were released by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from January 2023 to April 2024.

“We would like to emphasize that this figure is an extremely conservative estimate,” the group said in a statement. “It does not take into account the long-term costs of a sustained mass deportation operation or the incalculable additional costs required to acquire the institutional capacity to remove more than 13 million people in a short period of time.”

Polls during the campaign showed majority support for mass deportations among voters, but exit polls on Election Day showed stronger support for pathways to legal status for undocumented migrants than deporting them, while immigration has slipped down voters’ priority lists.