Trump border czar Tom Homan has defended the administration’s arrest of New Jersey‘s mayor outside an ICE facility—and warned others could follow.
“They can try to hide all they want with these protests around the facility, but we’re going to continue doing what we’re doing,” he told Fox News in an interview about the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in New Jersey’s largest city.
“You can’t cross that line, you can’t cross the line of impediment,” he added. “They can stand out and scream all they want. They can trespass; they’ll be arrested. If they impede, they will be arrested.”
Federal officials took Newark Mayor Ras Baraka into custody after a scuffle broke out at the facility, which Baraka had attended with several other Democratic Party officials to carry out an assessment of the site. He’s been slapped with misdemeanor trespassing charges.
A top aide of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—known as “ICE Barbie” for her love of publicity stunts on ICE raids and at detention centers—has since threatened to arrest other members of the party who were at the building, claiming they have “body-camera footage of some of these members of Congress assaulting our ICE enforcement officers.”
It is not clear at this stage who among the group of Democratic officials, which included 80-year-old House Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, the Trump administration believes assaulted DHS personnel. The footage in question has yet to emerge.
Coleman, for her part, shot back at the GOP for misrepresenting what happened, blaming President Donald Trump for normalizing the peddling of falsehoods by his party because “he can’t breathe without lying.”
Homan said during his Sunday morning appearance on Fox that he didn’t believe those officials had been candid when they said they were visiting the site to carry out an inspection amid mounting reports of immigration enforcement officers violating the constitutional rights of detainees.
“This isn’t about due process, this isn’t about constitutional rights, this is about politics,” he said. “They simply don’t want to see these people removed from the country.”
Homan added that he and his officers remain unfazed by the mounting public and political backlash to Trump’s nationwide deportation drive and that they would continue to execute their mandate regardless of any protests outside detention facilities.
“If they knowingly harbor and conceal, they’ll be arrested,” he said. “We’re going to do this job for the American people.”
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