Trump Border Czar: ICE Will ‘Absolutely’ Deport Legal Immigrants
President Donald Trump’s border czar declared Monday that immigrants living legally in the U.S. can “absolutely” be kicked out of the country—even if they have green cards.
Tom Homan was asked whether Mahmoud Khalil, who lead pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday night, can be deported even though he holds a green card and resides in the country legally.
“Absolutely we can,” Homan told Fox Business Network’s Stuart Varney.
“Did he violate the terms of his visa? Did he violate the terms of his residency here, you know, committing crimes, attacking Israeli students, locking down buildings, destroying property? Absolutely, any resident alien who commits a crime is eligible for deportation,” he said, referring to pro-Palestine students’ occupation of a Columbia administrative building during protests last year.
“And that’s just one out of many,” he added. Homan is an unelected official designated by Trump as “border czar.”
The comment comes hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that legal residents could get their green cards and visas revoked.
“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” he wrote in an X post that linked to a story about Khalil’s arrest.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told the Associated Press that the arrest was made “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”
The arrest was met with immediate backlash from immigration groups, who say it is a violation of the First Amendment, which protects the freedom of speech and assembly. His attorney, Amy Greer, told ABC News the arrest represents the “government’s open repression of student activism and political speech.”
“The U.S. government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech,” she said.
However, Kelli Stump, the president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told NPR that only an immigration judge can revoke a green card: “The government bears the burden of proving the reason that this person is deportable from the United States. And then just depending on what ground we’re looking at, that’s where the fight ensues.”
On Monday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman blocked Khalil’s removal from the U.S. to consider a habeas corpus petition filed by his lawyer.
Et Tu Coultergiest?
Even far-right commentator Ann Coulter seems uneasy with the Trump administration’s plans to deport a green card holder for leading pro-Palestine protests.
The 63-year-old wondered out loud whether the government was violating the First Amendment—the right to free speech—by arresting Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian who led pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University last year.
“There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?” Coulter said in a post on X.
Meanwhile: Over to the Raw Earth Reality TV Show;
Lara Trump said Americans “ought to be kissing the feet” of Elon Musk and President Donald Trump for their chainsaw approach to slashing federal spending that has wreaked havoc across government.
During an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday, the former Republican National Committee co-chair—who recently launched her own show on the network—said it was “laughable” that progressives claim that Musk’s work with her father-in-law is “enriching himself and his friends.”
Instead, she said, Americans should show gratitude to the president and his billionaire lieutenant for their mass purges of the federal workforce and nascent efforts to cut spending, which have already resulted in the mistaken firing of nuclear safety workers and experts working on a response to the avian flu outbreak.
“People ought to be kissing the feet of Elon Musk and Donald Trump for being the two people to actually do this,” Trump told Hannity.
She also insisted that Musk, who is not paid for his role as a senior White House adviser, is making a financial sacrifice.
“This guy is losing money because of what he’s doing, but he understands the importance of this moment,” she said. “We cannot continue in perpetuity spending the way we are. We cannot survive as a country.”
President Trump has promised to implement a number of measures that would benefit the wealthy like Musk and the corporations he leads.
While investors watched in horror as the stock market plunged on Monday as a result of President Donald Trump’s sprawling trade wars, he was busy reposting praise for his administration on Truth Social.
The president posted over a hundred times between noon and 6 p.m. on Monday while the Nasdaq fell 4 percent, marking its worst day since 2022. The S&P 500 dropped almost 3 percent.
The Magnificent 7 tech stocks—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—all fell, with Elon Musk’s car brand taking the biggest hit with a 15 percent tumble.
The hashtag “#stockmarketcrash” trended on Musk’s own social media platform, X, as the public reacted to the market’s nosedive.
Trump was also online, making 25 posts on Truth Social in the span of six minutes just before noon. He took a break and returned in the late afternoon to make over a hundred more posts.
The president mostly reposted articles praising his administration on a wide variety of issues, from the very tariffs that sent the markets spiraling to deportation operations and even his speech to a joint session of Congress last week.
In many of those posts, Trump continued to hail the sweeping tariffs his administration imposed on goods from Canada, Mexico, and China, even as those policies spooked investors into a massive sell-off.
The long list of articles included “Trump’s Tariffs Will Create Millions of Jobs” from the conservative website American Greatness, a USA Today opinion piece titled “Trump tariffs will save American jobs and level the playing field,” another column from a former Fox News contributor headlined “Trump’s Outside The Box Thinking Could Spark Supply-Side Revolution Not Seen Since Reagan,” and a Breitbart report titled: “Trump Tariff Win: Apple to Invest $500 Billion in U.S., Pledges to Create 20,000 Jobs.”
A White House official tried to downplay the stock market bloodbath on Monday afternoon.
“We’re seeing a strong divergence between animal spirits of the stock market and what we’re actually seeing unfold from businesses and business leaders,” said the official, who was granted anonymity, according to CNBC. “The latter is obviously more meaningful than the former on what’s in store for the economy in the medium to long term.”
In using “animal spirits,” a term used in economics to describe the psychological and emotional factors behind investors’ decisions in the face of volatility, the official appeared to suggest that the sell-off was driven by irrational fears and negativity.
Trump, however, appeared to justify investors’ fears over the weekend in a Sunday morning interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. The longtime Trump ally asked him whether he was expecting a recession this year.
Trump, however, refused to offer a straight answer, stating: “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tried to walk back his boss’ statement in a later interview on NBC News.
“There’s going to be no recession in America,” he told Meet the Press on Sunday. “Anybody who bets against Donald Trump, it’s like the same people who thought Donald Trump wasn’t going to win a year ago … you are going to see over the next two years the greatest set of growth coming from America … I would never bet on recession, no chance.”
Trump also reposted a number of other articles hailing him as a great president, including stories headlined “Rep Darrell Issa nominates Trump for Nobel Peace Prize,” “Mr. President, Sir, Our Heads Have Been Spinning From So Much Winning,” and “Trump is the Tiger Woods of presidents.”
Because that’s what big secure men do.