Border czar Tom Homan dismissed calls from Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, telling FNC’s “The Will Cain Show” on Wednesday that the agency will never be eliminated even if Democrats regain power in Washington.
Host Will Cain raised Ramirez’s position directly, saying she argues “that ICE is the single biggest threat, that ICE needs to be abolished, and we need to separate — create a separate civil immigration system.”
Homan pushed back with statistics on the agency’s enforcement record. “ICE has arrested hundreds of thousands of public safety threats and removed them out of our neighborhoods and communities, making this country safer,” he said. “Over 60% of ICE arrests are criminals. That’s just a stone-cold fact.”
He credited the agency with a broader role beyond deportations, citing narcotics investigations, drug smuggling probes, cases involving technology smuggled out of the country to foreign adversaries, and human trafficking investigations.
“If you want to abolish ICE, start by abolishing Congress, because they wrote the law that ICE is enforcing,” Homan said. “They enforced the Immigration Nationality Act, which was passed by Congress and signed by the president. If she doesn’t like what ICE is doing, then change the law.”
Homan predicted that rather than eliminating the agency outright, Democrats would instead try to cut off its resources if they retake control of government. “They will never abolish ICE,” he said. “I will tell you what they’re going to do they get back in control. They will starve them for money. They will starve them for money so they can’t do the job.”
He also framed the debate around who would be responsible for locating and removing people who entered the country illegally during the Biden administration. “And who’s going to remove the millions of people the Biden administration illegally released in the country?” Homan asked. “That is the endgame here. They stood by quietly for four years, where we had the historic border invasion, where millions of illegal aliens were illegally released in the country.”
Homan characterized the push to abolish ICE as consistent with what he described as a longstanding open-borders stance among some Democrats. “Now they want to abolish the agency that’s in charge of finding them and deporting them. They haven’t changed a bit. This is the same open borders crowd that think there’s some future political benefit in having millions of illegal aliens in this country that they think will be future Democratic voters,” he said.
