Thomas Homan, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is not going out quietly.
The federal law enforcement agency chief is retiring from his post later this week, but not without having had the final word in a national fight over the role ICE plays.
“It’s just ridiculous what’s going on,” Homan told the Washington Examiner Thursday, his second-to-last day, at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. Technically, Homan will be on the federal payroll until Saturday, but he will spend the day working remotely.
Homan was referring to calls in recent weeks by political candidates, local lawmakers, and even one sitting U.S. congresswoman to “abolish ICE.”
“It’s insulting that a member of Congress would say ‘abolish ICE’ when we’re enforcing the laws that Congress enacted. They give us a set of laws that we’re supposed to enforce and they give me the money to do it, then say ‘abolish ICE,'” Homan said during an interview late Thursday. “We’re doing what you told us to do.”
The 34-year law enforcement veteran said he believes some do not understand ICE was tasked with enforcing federal laws and is not operating out of its own agenda or rogue orders from the White House. People “don’t understand we’re not making this up,” he said.
Homan said President Trump’s executive order in January 2017 mandated he carry out all existing immigration laws whereas former President Barack Obama had instructed ICE to prioritize who it went after.
Even so, ICE deportation numbers during the middle of Obama’s administration in Fiscal Year 2012 — a total of 409,849 people removed — was significantly higher than Trump’s first year number of 226,119.
Homan argued 92 percent of all ICE arrests in FY 2017 either had a criminal arrest or conviction and were not being picked up just for immigration violations.
“We saved 904 children through our investigations from being exploited, being raped, being molested, being filmed,” he added.
ICE has been a controversial topic in recent years as cities and counties governed by primarily Democratic leaders began refusing to hold illegal immigrants in local law enforcement custody for federal agents to pick up and begin removal proceedings.
But last month, ICE came under greater fire when Attorney General Jeff Sessions said all migrants who were apprehended entering the U.S. between ports of entry, including first-time illegal entrants who arrived with children, should be referred from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to the Justice Department for prosecution.
Minors were subsequently turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services who would then place them with a parent or family friend in the U.S. until the parent who brought them into the country either had his or her charges dropped or served jail time.
Over the last two weeks, groups advocating for the migrant families have held protests outside ICE offices over this issue, including outside ICE’s Washington headquarters on Wednesday, and marches in various cities. Organizations have called for families to be reunited and ICE to be abolished.
But Homan said his agency is not relevant to this specific issue.
“I think a lot of the public is misinformed,” he said. “For instance, you shouldn’t be protesting ICE about family separation because that happens on the border.”
[ICE director: Democrats should ‘get their facts straight’ before protesting family separation]
Homan added he was “not vilifying Border Patrol,” but attempting to explain that public frustration against ICE was being wrongly directed.
“We [ICE] built family [detention] centers under that administration,” he said. “There’s so much fake information out there. It’s taken off. I think it’s feeding this ‘abolish ICE’ because they think ICE is doing terrible things when the fact is we’re doing what Congress told us to do.”
