President Donald Trump (center) with Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan during a Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Roundtable in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, March 20, 2018.
Kevin Dickey | Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen to pursue his sweeping deportation plan, potentially leaving him with more power and less congressional oversight than some of his own Cabinet members.
That’s because the appointee, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan, will not have direct responsibility for DHS or other agencies. Affiliates Its mission is to solve immigration problems.
Instead, Homan will become the Trump administration’s “border czar,” a title that would give him significant influence over immigration and border policy without the formal powers and guardrails that come with being a cabinet secretary.
Trump announced Homan’s selection in a post Sunday night truth society platform to put immigration hard-liners “in charge of our nation’s borders.”
Trump will also be “responsible for deporting all illegal aliens back to their countries of origin” wrote in the post.
Unlike Cabinet nominees or the roughly 1,200 other federal positions that require Senate confirmation, Homan does not require congressional approval to serve under Trump. Experts told CNBC he likely won’t face other forms of scrutiny from the legislative branch.
“White House appointees receive less oversight than Cabinet and lower-Cabinet officials,” said Katherine Hawkins, senior legal analyst at the Project on Government Oversight.
“It is much more difficult for Congress to enforce subpoenas against White House officials, who are more likely to invoke executive privilege and refuse to testify and have that refusal upheld by the courts,” Hawkins said.
These staffers may lack formal congressional authorization, but that does not necessarily mean they are deferential to their Senate-confirmed counterparts.
“Who is actually more powerful depends on factors such as access to the president and the willingness of Cabinet and other agency officials to resist White House requests,” Hawkins said.
A spokesman for Trump’s transition declined CNBC’s request for comment.
Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who helped challenge immigration policies during the Trump and Biden administrations, agreed.
He said Homan’s lack of agency status “does not diminish his influence and may make it more difficult to conduct meaningful examinations of his conduct.”
Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer for RAICES, an immigration rights advocacy group, said a czar can have significant policy influence “while impeding congressional oversight that is critical to ensuring that those acting on behalf of the U.S. government are held accountable.” “It’s important.”
Jubri said the posts “created an opaque environment that made it difficult, if not impossible, to determine who had authority over policies that had a broad impact on the American people.”
Lead the charge
On the face of it, Trump’s position gives Homan tremendous power.
When the new administration takes power on January 20, 2025, Homan will be responsible for implementing a core promise of Trump’s presidential campaign: deporting millions of undocumented immigrants.
Trump wrote that Homan’s purview includes but “is not limited to the southern border, the northern border, all maritime and aviation security.”
Implementing a mass deportation program will face unprecedented logistical challenges and require complex, large-scale collaboration among federal government agencies, local law enforcement, host states and other entities. The process of finding, detaining and relocating these individuals, including mixed-status families with children, will be fraught and the costs astronomical, NBC News reported.
Homan, 62, has been one of the policy’s strongest supporters. He is a frequent guest on Fox News and a speaker at the 2024 Republican National Convention It is said Earlier this year he vowed to “manage the largest deportation force this country has ever seen”.
Hohmann is known as Father The Trump administration’s controversial “zero tolerance” border policy, which separated thousands of immigrant families, was overturned by Trump in 2018.
In a recent interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” when asked if mass deportations could happen without separating families, Homan said: “Of course there is. Families can be deported together. .
Gelernt said he expected the appointment to have “profound anti-asylum, anti-immigration implications” given Homan’s actions during the first Trump administration and subsequent statements.
How Homan will use his powers is unclear. “It’s highly doubtful that anyone on the White House staff, who is sometimes called a czar, can actually exercise legal authority,” said John Harrison, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. tell congress 2009.
But Harrison told CNBC on Monday that “in reality,” these staffers can still have a significant impact on policy decisions.
Hawkins mentioned Trump’s senior policy aide Stephen Miller, saying he was “perhaps the most influential policy voice on immigration and border issues in the first Republican White House term.”
“DHS officials fought back to some extent,” she said, “but Miller held out longest and was closest to Trump, and generally got his way.”
Miller is expected to be named Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy. NBC reports on Monday.
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