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CV NEWS FEED // On the first full day of President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration arrested hundreds of criminal illegal migrants – including some charged with murder and child rape.
“Just yesterday in the last 24 hours, ICE [U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] arrested over 308 serious criminals,” Trump’s White House Border Czar Tom Homan told FOX News’ Lawrence B. Jones Wednesday morning.
“Some of them were murderers,” added Homan, a Catholic. “Some of them were rapists. Some of them raped a child.”
“So, ICE is doing their job,” the border czar noted. He emphasized that the agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is “performing excellent right now in the field, and they’re going to continue every day.”
“We’re concentrating on the worst first,” Homan explained to Jones, noting that, as he had outlined two months ago, the Trump administration is prioritizing the arrest of illegal migrants who are threats to public safety and the country’s national security.
Homan also indicated that the administration ended the use of multiple highly controversial parole programs which under the presidency of Joe Biden resulted in well over a million migrants entering the country.
Homan pointed out that on Tuesday, there were zero releases of migrants via both of the two most used Biden-era parole initiatives: the CBP One phone app and Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV).
In the “last 24 hours,” Homan said, the “total number of apprehensions” at the U.S.-Mexico border was 766. “Compare that to the 10,000 to 12,000 Biden had at one time.”
Homan called Trump the “greatest president in my lifetime,” adding: “He’s back.”
Sen. Katie Britt, R-AL, lauded the new administration’s work to secure the border on its first complete day. Britt is well-known for her role as the primary Senate sponsor of the bipartisan Laken Riley Act, which the upper chamber passed in a 64-35 vote Tuesday.
“Promises made, promises kept!” Britt wrote on X (formerly Twitter) the same day. “The Trump Administration’s first full day of ICE enforcement was larger than any day in four years of the Biden Administration.”
The senator noted that ICE’s nationwide arrests came despite unusually “frigid temperatures” across the nation and were “in every area of interest,” including “several murderers, rapists, sex offenders, and kidnappers.”
“ICE also went to jails and ordered almost 300 additional aliens to be released to ICE custody rather than our nation’s streets,” Britt stated. “Common sense is back.”
Homan has on multiple occasions described how his Catholic faith and upbringing influenced his humanitarian approach to the border crisis.
“I was raised in a Catholic family in Upstate New York and I’ve seen a lot of terrible things in my career,” Homan had told Fr. Robert McTeigue, SJ. on a 2020 episode of his podcast, “The Catholic Current.”
“Securing the border not only saves lives in this country,” Homan explained at the time. “It saves lives of the most vulnerable people that are enticed to come to this country with promises that can’t be kept.”
He detailed that in his decades of law enforcement experience, he has “seen many children who died making that journey. Thirty-one percent of women are being sexually assaulted making that journey.”
“So, it’s important having a secure border,” Homan told McTeigue.
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