Thomas Homan, a Pig’s Pig, Is Trump’s New Head of Immigration Department
Fascist Regime Gears Up for Mass Sweeps and Deportations
January 31, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The appointment Monday (January 30) of Thomas Homan to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is the latest flashing red signal that the Trump regime is gearing up to begin deporting millions of immigrants from Mexico, Latin America and elsewhere.
First came last Wednesday’s executive order from Trump to build “the Wall,” which also ordered the hiring of 15,000 more Border Patrol and ICE agents. That order also changed federal policy to facilitate Border Patrol and ICE working closely with local and state police.
On Thursday, Mark Morgan, the head of the Border Patrol, was forced out of his post. Morgan wanted to stay and sucked up to Trump by publicly criticizing Obama’s immigration policies. But he was opposed by the Border Patrol union, which ran an op-ed on the neo-Nazi Breitbart.com in November saying Morgan was “a disgrace.”
The Border Patrol are front-line enforcers of the U.S. immigration policy. The New York Times says the agency has been criticized for “an inability to discipline officers and for policies concerning the use of force.” To state it plainly, they are notorious for brutality, corruption, sexual abuse and murder—at least 33 people were killed by Border Patrol or ICE agents between January 2010 and October 2015, including a 12-year-old boy playing on the Mexican side of the border who the Border Patrol accused of throwing rocks.
The decision to give these thugs veto power over who is made their boss reflects the intent of Trump-Pence to have these pigs go hog wild on the immigrant masses. Getting rid of Morgan was like throwing a piece of raw meat to a junkyard dog to keep it loyal, happy and vicious.
This was the backdrop to Monday’s decision to replace Daniel Ragsdale, the acting director of ICE, with Thomas Homan.
Homan is a pig’s pig. A former New York cop, he spent almost 30 years in immigration enforcement, starting as a Border Patrol agent and moving up into administration. “I’m a cop in a cop’s job, and cops work for me,” Homan said in a 2015 interview with the Times. And Homan stressed his role as an enforcer, saying that once he gets an order to deport someone, “their due process is over”!
In 2009 Homan was made head of the newly formed ICE Enforcement and Removal Operation (ERO)—the part of ICE that actually rounds up and deports people. In that capacity he made “advances” in drawing local and state police into targeting people for deportation. In 2014, tens of thousands of mothers with small children, as well as unaccompanied minors, fleeing epidemic violence in Central America, surged across the Mexican border. Homan had major responsibility for rounding them up and detaining whole families in brutal make-shift detention centers. (See revcom.us article “Children Make Desperate 2,000 Mile Journey Seeking Safety: Now They Face a New Terror, Homeland ‘Security’ Police“] In 2015 (under Obama) Homan was given the 2015 Presidential Rank Award—the highest civil service award in the U.S.—for his “extraordinary” work in this crime against humanity.
To put it in a nutshell, Homan is, on the one hand a veteran pig with very close ties to the rank-and-file pigs that are to be the shock troops of mass deportations, and on the other hand, he has demonstrated both the organizational ability and the utter heartlessness, to be able to round up and detain tens of thousands of mothers and children in inhuman camps, to await being shipped back to the hellish conditions from which they had escaped at the risk of their lives.
All of these changes—radically new rules, massively more pigs, and new leadership capable of and committed to leading large scale fascist operations—are a clear signal that major assaults on immigrants in the U.S. are coming soon. This poses major challenges to the resistance which has sprung to life in recent days, and to all justice-loving people: to defend the people and places that are under attack, and do it in a way that further exposes the barbarity of this regime, spreads the spirit of resistance and revolt, brings more people into the organized forces taking this on, and does so as part of the fight to drive this fascist regime from power.
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