President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming “border czar” suggested that children who are U.S. citizens but whose parents are undocumented could be placed in a “halfway house” as part of mass deportation efforts.
“As far as U.S. children, that’s going to be a difficult situation, because we’re not going to detain U.S. citizen children, which means, you know, they’re going to be put in a halfway house,” Tom Homan told NewsNation in an interview shown Thursday.
“Or they can stay at home and wait for the officers to get the travel arrangements and come back to get the family,” he said.
He didn’t elaborate on what the halfway houses would be like or who would staff them, or comment on the feasibility of children staying at home by themselves.
There are approximately 4 million mixed-status families in the United States, in which some family members have legal status and others are undocumented.
Homan has done several interviews this week laying the groundwork for Trump’s plans to engage in mass deportations of undocumented people.
He told The Washington Post that he plans to bring back family detention, a practice the Biden administration ended in 2021. Democratsexcoriated President Joe Biden in 2023 over reports that he was weighing whether to bring back the policy.
Homan said that families could be held in “soft-sided” tent structures.
“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” he said. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”
Homan won’t be directly in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of his role, the Post notes, but he will work closely with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who is Trump’s pick to oversee the Department of Homeland Security, pending her confirmation. ICE is an agency of DHS.
Children may be kept in custody for a maximum of 20 days under a federal court ruling known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, which regulates the care and treatment of minors.
Homan told NBC News on Thursday that he thinks the Flores agreement was a “wrong decision,” and that he would challenge the legal framework.
“We’re looking at what the law currently says, but then again I think we need to litigate some of the decisions,” he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged family detention in the past and will challenge any aspect of deportation policy the group believes to be illegal, according to lawyer Lee Gelernt.
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“I’m hopeful the American public will not want little children spending days, weeks, potentially months, in a detention center,” Gelernt told NBC News.
Research released in January by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health showed the mental and physical harm suffered by children held in family detention for a prolonged period of time.
Trump himself hasn’t offered many specifics about his campaign pledge of mass deportations. He has said that families with undocumented parents and U.S.-born children would be deported together, as he doesn’t “want to be breaking up families.”