In an interview with the Washington Post published on December 26, Tom Homan, Trump’s incoming “border czar,” promised that the new administration would construct large internment camps, euphemistically dubbed “family facilities,” to expedite the mass deportation of human beings out of the United States, including US citizens.

In an article titled, “Trump’s top border adviser says he will bring back family detention,” Homan said that as “border czar” he would work alongside South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to resume detaining entire families, including those with US-born children, for weeks or even months at a time in “soft-sided” prison facilities before deporting them.

He said, “We’re going to need to construct family facilities. How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”

“Soft-sided” immigrants’ camps have been previously constructed during the Biden administration, including in Arizona.

While Customs and Border Protection (CBP) claims the facilities are “weatherproof,” in the last three years alone climate-change driven weather events have lead to mass casualties in several southern states, including where human beings aren’t forced to reside in plastic tents.

This past January, an “arctic blast” bomb cyclone lead to at least 55 deaths across 12 southern states, with fatalities from hypothermia and icy road conditions reported in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. In February 2021, winter storm “Uri” led to a reported 151 deaths in Texas, although some estimates are as high as 702 after the storm knocked out Texas’ power grid leaving millions without electricity.

There is no question the facilities will be breeding grounds for abuse. Under the current Biden administration, immigrants are already treated as less-than-human. Last month, video emerged of a CBP agent running down immigrants in his government vehicle as they were trying to cross the border into San Diego from Tijuana. Despite video evidence of the vehicle driving at a high rate of speed without any attempt to hit the brakes before striking a person, representatives for the Border Patrol told Border Report that an “investigation” is underway with no criminal charges filed as of this writing.

Earlier this month, a joint investigation between the Washington Post, Lighthouse Reports and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that over the last seven years “hundreds more people have drowned” in the Rio Grande river compared to what the US and Mexican governments have reported.

The organizations found that between 2017 and 2023, that is, during both the Trump and Biden administrations, at least 1,107 people drowned trying to cross the river, with “more than 1 in 10 drownings involving a child” in 2023.

The largest concentration of these deaths, 858, occurred in Texas. This figure is nearly 300 more than CBP reported along the entire southwest border at the time.

Less than three weeks after the report was released, Abbott posted several photos on his X social media account boasting about building more border walls in Maverick County.

“Texas will continue working with President Donald Trump and Border Czar Tom Homan to secure the border and build the wall,” Abbott wrote.

Speaking to the Post, Homan defended detaining and deporting entire families, including legal US citizens. The fascist gruffed, “Here’s the issue... You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”

Homan’s words are not just idle threats, but express deadly serious bipartisan intent. Homan has spent over three decades waging war on immigrants for the federal government, beginning as a border agent in 1984 before moving his way up the ranks to eventually become an executive at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under President Barack Obama and then acting director of ICE under Trump.

In 2015, Obama presented Homan a Presidential Rank award for his role in carrying out “interior” mass deportations, which earned Obama the well-deserved moniker “deporter-in-chief.” Transitioning smoothly from Obama to Trump, Homan embraced Trump’s fascistic rhetoric and frequently appeared on Fox News to trumpet the administration’s “enforcement” policies.

In his interview with the Post, Homan confirmed that workplace raids, which were temporarily suspended under the Biden administration, would also resume under Trump. Homan said. “We haven’t really worked out the plan for worksite enforcement,” adding “We know that employers are going to be upset.”

Homan also said the Trump administration would resume the “Remain in Mexico” program, which blocks asylum seekers from entering the country while their cases are adjudicated in US courts for months, or years, at a time.

In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins on December 18, Homan likewise promised to build large camps as part of a “massive deportation operation” that would begin on “day one” of the Trump administration.

“Yeah, we are going to build detention facilities because, yeah, this is a massive deportation operation,” Homan told Collins. Pledging to send teams of border gestapo into workplaces and homes, Homan said, “Millions of people have entered this country illegally... we are going to enforce the law and to do that we are going to have teams throughout the country arresting these targets and we got to build detention facilities to hold these people so we can remove them.”

Homan promised to detain and deport as many people as possible, saying, “The target number is arresting as many people as we can possibly arrest with the resources we have.” Calling out “sanctuary cities” that do not cooperate with ICE, Homan said, “that forces us to go into the neighborhood... we got to send a whole team to the neighborhood. What happens there? We are going to find others, others that are non-priority criminals, but guess what, they are going to be arrested too. So sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don’t want.”

Homan concluded, saying, “This operation isn’t going to stop. We got four years to do this operation... if you are in the country illegally, you got a problem.”

In the same interview Homan praised Trump’s top neo-Nazi adviser Stephen Miller. During the first Trump administration, Miller and Homan worked together to implement Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, including the anti-human “family separation” policy, which led to 4,656 children being forcibly separated from the their parents, according to a government task force. As of March 2024, more than 1,300 children remain “unaccounted for,” according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

“Look, me and Steve Miller, there is no daylight between me and Steve Miller,” Homan told Collins. “He was the architect of some of the most significant successful border policies in the history of this nation,” he added.

Since 2015, Trump and the Republican Party have attempted to divide the working class by scapegoating immigrants for the historic crisis of the capitalist system. Despite posturing as defenders of immigrants, President Joe Biden, while finding time to pardon his son and other ruling class criminals, has said nothing about Trump’s police-state deportation plans and threats to deport US citizens. Nor has he raised the possibility of using the power of the presidential pardon to pre-emptively protect millions of people and their family members from Trump and his allies’ deportation operations.

The silence and failure of the Biden-Harris administration to protect the democratic rights of the working class is mirrored by the Democratic Party, which is quickly adapting to Trump and the Republicans’ plans for massive deportations and social spending cuts in order to secure funding for the military and wars in Ukraine, the Middle and the Far East.

The struggle to defend the democratic rights of all, including immigrants, requires that the working class break irrevocably with the Democratic Party and unite the international working class under a socialist program, which upholds the right of human beings to live and move freely across national borders.

Workers must begin taking action now to protect their brothers and sisters by forming defense committees in their neighborhoods, schools and workplaces to safeguard immigrants and mobilize the working class against the bipartisan assault on democratic rights.