Trump to attend a gala with proponents of his family separation border policies

Donald Trump gave a special shoutout during remarks in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this week, saying he wanted to “pay tribute” to a person he very much respected.

Trump thanked Tom Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s administration and has since been a frequent commentator on Fox News.

“He is some man,” Trump said, adding: “He has been so great on television. He’s been so respectful of the job that we did as an administration.”

Homan was an early proponent of the administration’s controversial “zero tolerance” policy, which resulted in at least 5,500 families being separated at the southern border in 2018 before Trump himself signed an executive order ending the practice after intense backlash from human rights groups. Homan now heads up Border911, a nonprofit group that warns of the supposed threat posed by undocumented immigrants.

On Thursday, the former president is set to see him again at a Mar-a-Lago gala hosted by Border911. According to a flyer promoting the event, the gathering will also include Matt Whitaker, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Justice when it implemented “zero tolerance.” Later, when Whitaker testified before Congress as acting attorney general, he conceded there was no plan to reunite families.

Trump’s open-armed association with the group — and his intensifying focus on migrants and crime on the campaign trail — provide one of the clearest windows yet into a potential second term and the hard-liners he might appoint to the Department of Homeland Security to enforce immigration laws.

In campaign rallies and interviews with Newsmax and Fox News, Trump has said he’d put Homan and others back into a potential second administration