Trump makes hardliner Homan "border czar"

Homan was acting head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in 2017 and 2018. He is considered an advocate of the controversial decision to separate the children of illegal immigrants from their parents. It then took years in some cases to reunite the families. Homan - and Trump - later said that the measure was intended as a deterrent so that families would not seek to come to the USA in the first place.

Homan recently caused a stir in an interview. He was asked on the TV program "60 Minutes" whether a mass deportation operation was possible without separating families. Homan's answer: "Of course it can. Families can be deported together." Children born in the USA, who are therefore US citizens, would also have to leave the country as their parents had immigrated illegally, he argued.

Trump had made securing the borders and "the biggest deportation operation in US history" a central point of his election campaign. According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, it is estimated that around eleven million undocumented immigrants will be living in the USA in 2022. Some of them have been in the country for decades. According to the Pew figures, they belong to around 6.3 million households with a total of more than 22 million people.