Trump border czar pointedly warns sanctuary cities could be prosecuted if they harbor aliens

President-elect Donald Trump’s border czar is warning sanctuary cities of dire consequences if they refuse to turn over illegal immigrants, saying he’ll seek Justice Department authority to charge officials with obstruction and harboring if they don’t turn over illegal border crossers in their custody.

“They need to be aware of a couple things. No. 1, impeding a federal law enforcement officer is a crime. No. 2, if you knowingly harbor or conceal an illegal alien from ICE, that's a crime,” Tom Homan told Just the News in a wide-ranging interview. “So don't cross that line!”

The former acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was named earlier this month by Trump to coordinate all border security issues from the White House starting Jan. 20. He has been crafting plans already.

Both the president-elect and Homan have been clear they intend to launch mass deportations of the more than 14 million illegal aliens believed to have entered the country during the Biden presidency, beginning with those who are accused or convicted of crimes.

Since then, some blue states and cities have announced they will resist the Trump administration’s effort when it begins in January. The city of Los Angeles, for instance, passed an ordinance last week affirming it is a sanctuary city, matching the state law that California first passed in 2017.

Homan told the Just the News, No Noise television show on Friday night that those laws can be superseded by federal immigration law. “Federal law trumps state and local law every time,” he said.

“If we know someone's in a county jail and we know they're there,” Homan continued. “How do we know it? When they run the fingerprints from NCIC, they bounce against the DHS database, we know, OK, we just got prints off this alien in this jail because his fingerprints just came back. And that's where he's at right now.

"So if we know he's there, they don't give us access to him. Is that not harboring?”

Homan said he will ask Trump’s next attorney general – currently former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has been nominated – for a formal opinion on whether a county or city jail’s refusal to turn over an illegal alien in custody to ICE constitutes a federal criminal violation. 

“I'll leave it up to the attorney general, but I think it needs to be fully reviewed. And I hope they agree with me,” he said.

Homan said he hopes Trump and the new GOP-led Congress will work together to create other disincentives, like banning federal funds to local and state jurisdictions that give sanctuary to illegal aliens. 

“We’ve got to pull federal funding. We got to take the money away,” he said. “And look, I'm hoping to come to the game ready because President Trump and myself, we've been clear that public safety threats and national security threats would be the priorities right out of the gate. Public safety threats, national security threats, we got plenty in the fight. So you know, what mayor or governor doesn't want public safety threats out of their communities.”

Homan said he hopes Mexico’s new socialist president will reverse her country’s 2023 declaration to oppose an effort to reconstitute the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that forced asylum seekers to stay on the southern side of the U.S. border until approved for entry.

"So we're hoping Mexico steps up, because we're going to save a lot of lives by securing that border,” he said. “I hope she understands that, and if she doesn't, then, you know President Trump’s one bad-ass president.” 

Homan also addressed reports in Congress that federal government has lost track of at least 30,000 unaccompanied migrant children who arrived in the U.S. under Biden without parents, vowing to try to find each child while cautioning some already may have suffered a terrible fate.

“Look, people are dead because of the policies of this administration,” he said. “And many of these children will never find and many are going to be in sex trafficking. Many are going to be in forced labor. So that's one of the things President Trump's committed to, is trying to find these kids. It's going to be hard, but we need to find them and save them.”