Homan said “Shame on you” about so-called sanctuary cities that don’t cooperate with the federal government in enforcing immigration law and vowed to aggressively target sanctuary cities and localities that limit cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“If I offend anyone, I don’t care,” Homan said of his border strategy.
He suggested jurisdictions refusing to grant ICE jail access would see more at-large sweeps in neighborhoods and workplaces.
“If you knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien from ICE, that is a felony,” Homan said. “We’ll find (them) in the community if local authorities won’t grant us access to jails.”
Homan singled out Chicago, criticizing Mayor Brandon Johnson for reaffirming the city’s sanctuary stance, particularly its refusal to let local police serve as ICE agents in schools or workplaces.
“The mayor of Chicago, not a real bright guy, says Tom Homan isn’t welcome,” he said. “Well, guess where Tom Homan will be on day one: Chicago, Illinois.”
Johnson appeared on CNN last week where he vowed to “protect residents from federal overreach.”
“What the Trump administration has called for is for local police departments around the country to behave as ICE agents,” the Chicago mayor said. “In sanctuary cities, that is not permissible.”
Sanctuary policies, upheld as lawful by courts, allow local governments to set their level of cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
However as noted by the American Immigration Council, there is “no one clear definition of what it means for a state or local government to adopt sanctuary policies.”
Homan has said that more cooperation between federal and local law enforcement is needed to address violent crime and narcotics flow.
“Sanctuary cities are sanctuaries for criminals,” Homan said in a February roundtable on Fox News.
A study published in 2020 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “sanctuary policies … had no detectable effect on crime rates.”
“What I found is that sanctuary policies do protect immigrants, and they also don’t do any harm to public safety,” Stanford University researcher David Hausman told the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab in 2020. “The data show that sanctuary policies have no measurable effect on crime.”
