Today, Mayor Adams will meet with Tom Homan, former acting director of ICE – never confirmed due to the likely failure of his nomination – and Donald Trump’s choice for the somewhat vague position of “border czar », probably a sort of coordinator of all policies. federal immigration policy.
We’re not sure what Homan will say or what he’ll bring to the table, but the former political commentator has spent recent years attacking sanctuary cities and threatening their leaders, including recently with lawsuits for for daring not to cooperate with the Trump administration’s planned immigration crackdown.
We also don’t know what the mayor will say to Homan, but we hope he makes the case that the city has racked up $6 billion in costs to care for migrants, with barely a cent in aid from the federal government , for what is supposed to be a federal responsibility. Any help with these expenses would be much appreciated.
What the mayor also needs to keep in mind is that when Homan and his colleagues talk about mass evictions, they’re not just talking about criminals or even newly arrived migrants. Homan talks about the people who work at your laundromat, the delivery people who bring your food, the construction workers, the paralegals, the nurses and home health aides, and countless other lifelong, law-abiding New Yorkers , who are either completely undocumented or have one of the administrative statuses that Trump wants to end, namely DACA and TPS.
There are two things that cannot be true at once: The new Trump administration cannot both go after primarily violent criminals, as it has often argued, and simultaneously hope to arrest and deport 15 million people or more.
There simply aren’t many violent criminals, not just among the country’s immigrant population, but in the country as a whole. These numbers are only remotely possible if the government undertakes a relatively indiscriminate, neighborhood-by-neighborhood detention campaign, even going beyond the total number of undocumented people in the United States.
Will Trump, Homan and anti-immigration guru Stephen Miller have the logistical and legal capacity to run this campaign within the parameters they have set? Probably not, but it’s probably their ultimate goal, even if they never get there. Even for a fraction of the total number of detentions and deportations desired, this effort will cause enormous damage to the legal, social, political and economic fabric of a country that has built its strength and reputation on mass immigration for two centuries.
We hope the mayor will emphasize to Homan that the city’s 8 million residents are part of his constituency and that immigrants are not a separate population. This is not the case; Even if many of these people ultimately may not vote for him, or at all, that still makes them part of the working-class New York that Adams so often boasts about.
While Adams has talked about changing sanctuary city laws to facilitate greater cooperation with ICE, he should make it clear to Homan that he is not talking about massive raids that could threaten the economic dynamism and viability of a city composed of approximately 40% inhabitants of foreign origin.
As for Mr. Homan, it’s only a short hop from City Hall to the Battery to see the Statue of Liberty. Homan should take the view into account.
