Trump wasn’t kidding about that fascist rally. Just ask his ICE chief.

Much has been written about the racist bombast of Trump’s Sunday night rally, a spectacle reminiscent of Hitler’s rallies of the 1930s, which prepared Germany and the world for mass deportation and genocide. Predictably, Trump’s closest advisor Stephen Miller praised Trump took the stage and reiterated his promise to forcibly remove millions of immigrants from the United States– “Who is going to stand up and say: the cartels are gone! The criminal migrants are gone! The gangs are gone! America is only for Americans and Americans!” But just a few hours later, Trump’s pick to lead immigration enforcement, Tom Homan, could be seen spouting the same violent rhetoric in a 60 minutes interviewjust at a lower volume.

Homan is rightly receiving more attention as election day approaches. As Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was the same way responsible for the policy of family separation like Miller, its more widely recognized architect. He has spent the past four years as a kind of Trump ICE director in exile, regularly appearing on Fox and spreading baseless claims about a “invasionby promoting immigrants crossing the southern border, and his own leadership through his group Border911. The organization tours the country, supported by dark money donors, spreading disinformation about immigration and immigrants. Their motto says it all: “The border is our theater of war.” Homan sees himself as someone who has had a combat experience in confronting immigrants. “I know what it’s like to arrest an alien and feel bad about it,” Homan says said in a 2018 profile. “I know what it’s like to see a dead alien on the trail.” This is how he sells his credibility.

Homan has been participating in a mass deportation promotional tour in recent months, culminating in the Republican National Convention. represent Trump’s plans on the main stage. Are 60 minutes repeat performance Sunday night was probably intended to sound reasonable. His answers tried to dodge the details of what mass deportations would entail, as other Trump surrogates have done. But he ultimately offered a prediction of sorts, offering several excuses that a Trump administration would also likely use to justify mass deportations. It was a useful warning to the rest of us, not quite a mask-off moment, but more than a glimpse behind it.

“It won’t be a massive cleanup of neighborhoods; it is not going to build concentration camps,” Homan emphasized 60 minutesCecila Vega closes with a routine dig at what the media has said about these plans. “I read it all, it’s ridiculous.” Homan said he would prefer to describe mass deportations as “targeted arrests.” He later protested when Vega asked him why Stephen Miller said mass deportations would involve large-scale raids. “I don’t use the term ‘raids,'” Homan replied. “You’re probably talking about workplace enforcement operations” – where ICE descends on a workplace unannounced and makes mass arrests.

Vega pushed back, “That’s a raid.” Homan didn’t really answer, except to fall back on another Trump trope: “That’s where we find a lot of cases of human trafficking,” Homan said. When Homan ran out of preferential terms designed to make mass deportation sound more bureaucratic, he instead claimed a nobler goal than just deporting people: immigration enforcement raids are also about rescuing “women and children,” he claimed, who are forced to work to pay’. of their smuggling costs.” (This is misleading: raids are possible worsen treatment of immigrant workers, as research from the National Immigration Law Center has found – employers have used the threat of calling ICE to exert control over immigrant workers.)

It’s hard to take anything about “fighting human trafficking” seriously from someone who worked in the Trump administration. Under Trump, these were often survivors of human trafficking invoked justify repression against immigration. Yet immigrant survivors were not only denied assistance, such as special visas; some even were focused by ICE. Years of MAGA’s embrace of the cult of sex trafficking conspiracy theory QAnon didn’t help either. (It’s a small MAGA world, too: Homan’s group Border911 started out as one part of the America Project, a group co-founded by Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser taken the QAnon oath.)

The more enduring propaganda for mass deportations, however, is the figure of the “illegal immigrant” and the “criminal alien,” a fixture of Trump rallies, of Stephen Miller’s most damaging rhetoric, and of Tom Homan’s ostensibly more representative tone.

Trump and Miller’s rhetoric revives salacious and violent stories of white supremacy – from the anti-black rape myths of Birth of a nation to the apocalyptic novel that Miller has promoted, The camp of the saints, in which invading immigrants overrun a white nation and use rape as a weapon. At Madison Square Garden, Miller told the crowd that they had “the right to live in a country where criminal gangs cannot simply cross our border and rape and murder with impunity.” Threatening rape has been the centerpiece of Trump’s presidential pitch since 2015, with his comments about Mexican immigrants (“They’re rapists”). The Trump campaign’s anti-immigrant narrative has only become more steeped in horror and racism. Such stories have also been an essential part of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, as expressed not only by white supremacist mass shooters but by Trump’s running size. As Miller continued at the meeting, “Think about how corrupt, hateful and evil the system is that allows gangs to come into this country and rape and murder little girls – I’m not just saying that, you’ve read the stories, it’s happening. every day.” This conspiracy theory tells whites that they are losing their power to non-whites, either because immigrant voters “replace” white voters, or because immigrants “replace” white children by raping white women. “Who is going to stand up for our daughters?” Miller thundered on. “Who is going to stand up for the girls of America, the women of America, the families of America?”

Homan’s plea for mass deportations may be intended to sound more reasonable, even if he and Miller were ultimately working from the same plan. He has argued that mass deportations are necessary to protect the American people and American sovereignty, both of which Homan has depicted as in danger, much like the innocents in Miller’s stories. At the Heritage Foundation “policy party” at the RNC in July, Homan was effusive proclaimed that, as he envisioned a mass deportation, “no one is off the table. Bottom line: Every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It is a crime to enter this country illegally.” (Homan is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the group now best known for leading Project 2025 shame.) Trump and Miller’s “criminal migrants,” the invading rapists they summon, can be kept in check by Homan’s much more elaborate “illegal alien” — who is a criminal regardless of what they have or haven’t done.

Homan didn’t quite go there in his 60 minutes interview. He tried to draw a clearer line. “If I’m in charge of this, my priorities are first the threats to public safety and the threats to national security,” he told Vega, the reporter. “First implies others to follow,” she insisted. Homan quickly responded, “Absolutely.” What if other people become involved in the raids – would an undocumented grandmother, Vega asked, be deported? Homan’s answer was: that could be possible. “Let the judge decide,” he said. “We are going to remove people that the judge has ordered deported.” (Of course, immigration officials don’t just limit themselves during raids to those people who a judge has already ordered deported, and those people won’t end up before a judge unless they are first arrested and detained, on Homan’s orders. .) “Is there any way to to carry out mass deportations without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course it is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.” If undocumented parents were forced to abandon their U.S.-born child, he said, “they created that crisis.”

Homan has tried to present the mass deportation as an anonymous process that is set in motion, and not as a series of decisions that people make and with which he would exercise power. As Homan had said earlier: No one is off the table. Miller’s propaganda from the stage at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night may sound uglier, but Homan’s stems from the same logic: Whatever they do, no matter how repressive, illegal or destructive, is not their responsibility. He means it sounds reasonable and inevitable. But what he affirms instead is that every hateful word uttered at Trump’s fascist rally is serious — with a policy proposal to back it up.