Tom Homan vs Stephen Miller: Who will decide Trump’s mass deportation agenda?
Among weeks of controversial cabinet picks, Donald Trump chose immigration hardliners Tom Homan and Stephen Miller to join him for his second term. It was an unsurprising move for the president-elect, whose successful reelection bid largely hinged on painting immigrants as “invaders” he would deport en masse from the United States.
Homan and Miller have been tapped to serve as Trump’s “border czar” and Homeland Security adviser, respectively. The pair were the architects behind some of the most controversial immigration actions of the first Trump administration. Homan served as the acting director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from early 2017 to mid-2018, while Miller worked as a senior policy advisor.
Data analysis from the American Immigration Council shows that the cost of Trump’s plan to round up, detain, and conduct mass deportations of a million immigrants per year would cost $88 billion annually. The cost of deporting all undocumented immigrants in the United States, many of whom have lived and worked in the country for decades, would reach $967.9 billion over 10 years.
How Trump attempts to achieve his campaign promise may depend on who he listens to: Homan or Miller.
Both men are unrelenting in their pursuit to enact Trump’s “America First” agenda but have different ideas about how to reach it. Which side wins out will have massive consequences on what immigration looks like for the next four years.
Tom Homan’s approach to enforcement
Nine days before the presidential election, Homan went on the CBS show 60 Minutes to discuss Trump’s mass deportation plan. When pressed by the host about what the plan would look like, Homan went on the defensive.
“Well, let me tell you what it’s not going to be first,” Homan responded. “It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps.” He called those ideas “ridiculous,” saying that the administration would instead rely on “targeted arrests.”
During a targeted arrest, ICE agents often raid homes or workplaces looking for a specific individual. Though “collateral arrests” of nearby family members and coworkers sometimes occur, most of ICE’s enforcement operations are aimed at a particular person.
If ICE continues these kinds of arrests, Homan’s proposed logistics would be “business as usual, but times two,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
During Trump’s first term, at its peak, ICE deported around 86,000 people.
“ICE has not hit over 100,000 deportations from the interior of the country since 2014,” Reichlin-Melnick told Paste BN. “ICE doesn’t really have a modern history of carrying out the kind of numbers Trump wants.”
He estimates that it would take 46 years to deport all undocumented immigrants. Based on the numbers alone, he believes that Homan’s “targeted arrests” approach is more plausible. With fewer guardrails on ICE, there will still be more deportations, but likely not to the scale Trump has expressed.
Stephen Miller’s vision for immigration
Upon winning the election, Trump immediately tapped Miller to be deputy chief of staff for policy and a Homeland Security adviser.
Miller’s approach to mass deportations mirrors the many extreme methods he implemented during Trump’s first term.
“Stephen Miller is absolutely apocalyptic about what mass deportations would look like on his end,” Reichlin-Melnick told Paste BN. “He talks about detention camps in Texas with very clear, specific operational details.”
In a September 2023 interview, Miller said Trump would need to “mobilize the U.S. military, state, federal, and local law enforcement” to round up people, then “build an extremely large holding area” that could detain up to 70,000 undocumented immigrants at a time.
In justifying the need for a massive staging facility and around-the-clock deportation flights, Miller depicted this scenario:
“Logistically, what a lot of people don't think about or realize, is that if a deportation team goes to a particular house and arrests an illegal alien family – so, say, a mother, a father, and four children − there's not just a plane on a tarmac that's 10 minutes away ready to take them.”
There are questions about whether such an operation would be legal. But one thing is certain: Miller’s influence over Trump’s first immigration agenda cannot be overstated.
In the early days of Trump’s presidency, Miller crafted the executive order that sought to ban all nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from traveling or immigrating to the United States. He's also credited with slashing protections for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and cutting the number of refugees admitted into the country.
Along with Homan, Miller was key in drafting the zero tolerance policy that led to the separation of thousands of families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The heavily criticized policy, aimed at deterring unauthorized migration, ran from 2017 to 2018. As of 2023, over 1,000 migrant children remain separated from their families, many of whom were legally seeking asylum.
Two approaches, same result
Will Trump choose Homan's more measured approach? Or Miller's aggressive one?
"He should go with all of the above," said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation.
"I have no doubt Tom Homan will get the aliens out of the country, who, even before coming to this country, were convicted criminals," von Spakovsky said.
But he also advocated for Miller's proposal, where entire families are deported together.
"What would you think of parents who would abandon their young children here?" he asked. "If the parents were here illegally, obviously they should take their children with them."
What about those with U.S. citizen children? Von Spakovsky said granting those children citizenship was a "misinterpretation" of the 14th Amendment, which has guaranteed American citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil since 1898.
"Those who believe our Constitution requires birthright citizenship are wrong," von Spakovsky said. "That is something else, frankly, that I hope President Trump will end."
By all accounts, it appears Trump is siding with Miller for now.
Trump recently confirmed reports that he plans to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to conduct mass deportations.
But no matter how Trump carries out mass deportations, Reichlin-Melnick said the damage to the United States will be significant.
“Even if it doesn’t end up being 11 million people, the fear has real effects on the people who become the target of this very hungry deportation machine.”