JUST THE NEWS – President-elect Donald Trump’s border czar is warning sanctuary cities of dire consequences if they refuse to turn over illegal immigrants, saying he’ll seek Justice Department authority to charge officials with obstruction and harboring if they don’t turn over illegal border crossers in their custody.
“They need to be aware of a couple things. No. 1, impeding a federal law enforcement officer is a crime. No. 2, if you knowingly harbor or conceal an illegal alien from ICE, that’s a crime,” Tom Homan told Just the News in a wide-ranging interview. “So don’t cross that line!”
The former acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was named earlier this month by Trump to coordinate all border security issues from the White House starting Jan. 20. He has been crafting plans already.
Both the president-elect and Homan have been clear they intend to launch mass deportations of the more than 14 million illegal aliens believed to have entered the country during the Biden presidency, beginning with those who are accused or convicted of crimes.
Since then, some blue states and cities have announced they will resist the Trump administration’s effort when it begins in January. The city of Los Angeles, for instance, passed an ordinance last week affirming it is a sanctuary city, matching the state law that California first passed in 2017.
Homan told the Just the News, No Noise television show on Friday night that those laws can be superseded by federal immigration law. “Federal law trumps state and local law every time,” he said.
“If we know someone’s in a county jail and we know they’re there,” Homan continued. “How do we know it? When they run the fingerprints from NCIC, they bounce against the DHS database, we know, OK, we just got prints off this alien in this jail because his fingerprints just came back … ”
