Trump speaks to China’s Xi Jinping days before inauguration

(WASHINGTON) — For the first time in U.S. history, military aircraft were used this past week to deport scores of undocumented migrants from the United States. Middle schools, Trump administration officials say, are now seen as places to target for immigration enforcement operations. And, according to President Trump’s “border czar,” every undocumented immigrant should worry they could be arrested at any time, even if they have no criminal record.

The “border czar,” Tom Homan, says it’s all part of the Trump administration’s effort to send a “clear” message: “There’s consequences [for] entering the country illegally,” he told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz on Sunday.

“If we don’t show there’s consequences, you’re never going to fix the border problem,” he said.

More than 11 million undocumented immigrants are currently estimated to be living in the U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to take unprecedented action to remove as many of them as possible and stem the flow of more migrants coming to the southern border.

In his first several days in office, Trump declared a national emergency at the border, announced an end to the so-called practice of “catch and release” — when migrants claiming asylum are given court dates and then released pending those proceedings — and sought to overturn the long-held Constitutional right of birthright citizenship, a move that immediately faced legal challenges and was at least temporarily blocked by a federal judge.

As for the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country, Homan said the administration will deport “as many as we can,” starting with threats to public safety threats and national security, Homan said.According to estimates released by House Republicans last year, based on government data, hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants in the country are convicted criminals or have charges pending against them. Government statistics indicate that in the past four years, hundreds of migrants were caught along the southern border with names matching known or suspected terrorists on a government watchlist. And Homan has said more than 2 million people were detected along the border but never captured, so authorities don’t know who they are or what threat some of them could pose.

According to statistics released by the Department of Homeland Security last year, a tiny fraction of those who reached U.S. borders in the prior three years had any kind of criminal record, and the vast majority of them involved nonviolent crimes, such as driving under the influence or previously entering the country illegally.

Homan told ABC News that the Trump administration is only “in the beginning stages” of carrying out its mass deportation plan, making public safety threats and national security threats a “priority,” but “as that aperture opens, there’ll be more arrests nationwide.”

And he warned that there will be “collateral arrests,” especially in the so-called “sanctuary cities” that he says are resistant to helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials locate and arrest undocumented immigrants already in local custody for other crimes.

“Sanctuary cities lock us out of the jails,” said Homan, who led ICE as acting director in Trump’s first administration.

According to Homan, that creates significant safety concerns: When an undocumented immigrant arrested for a serious crime is released by local authorities, instead of being deported, it “endangers the community.”

Nevertheless, Homan said that’s a time when ICE officers would likely make “collateral arrests.”

“When we find him, he’s going to be with others … [and] if they’re in the country illegally, they’re coming too,” he said.

He emphasized that anyone in the country unlawfully is “on the table.”

“It’s not OK to violate the laws of this country,” he said. “We have millions of people standing in line, taking the test, doing their background investigation, paying the fees that want to come in the right way.”

“So if you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem,” he said.

On Monday, during Trump’s first day in office, acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman issued a directive telling immigration authorities they could conduct operations in so-called “sensitive” areas that he said were off-limits during the Biden administration.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” he said in a statement.

Others, however, said the administration was simply creating fear within the immigrant community, with the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration saying that “turning places of care, healing and solace into places of fear and uncertainty … will note make our communities safer.

He said that as they prioritize national security threats and public safety threats, ICE officers might have to even go into schools because “many” members of gangs tied to South and Central America, such as MS-13, are between 14 and 17 years old.

In his interview with ABC News, Homan said that no other law enforcement agency is restricted from entering certain locations to promote public safety in the same way ICE has been.

“Name another agency, another law enforcement agency, that has those type of requirements, that they can’t walk into a school or doctor’s office or a medical campus,” he said. “No other agency is held to those standards.”

“These are well-trained [ICE] officers with a lot of discretion, and when it comes to a sensitive location, there’s still going to be supervisory review,” he said. “But ICE officers should have discretion to decide if a national security threat or a public safety threat [is] in one of these facilities.”

Homan said anyone already in the country unlawfully “should leave,” and those looking to claim asylum should “do it the legal way.”

“Go to the embassy, go to the point of entry,” he said. “You shouldn’t come to this country and ask to get asylum and the first thing you do is break our laws by entering illegally.”

In the meantime, Homan said the Trump administration is using not just the military but the “whole” government, including the Justice Department, to support its mass deportation plan, which allows ICE officers to concentrate on conducting enforcement operations.

But Homan acknowledged that the federal government won’t be able to remove every undocumented immigrant in the U.S., and that his “success is going to be based on what Congress gives us.”

ICE doesn’t currently have enough funding from Congress to detain all of the undocumented immigrants that the Trump administration says it hopes to arrest.

“I’m being realistic,” he said. “We can do what we can with the money we have. We’re going to try to be efficient. But with more money we have, the more we can accomplish.”

“What price [do] you put on national security?” he added. “When you … don’t secure that border, that’s when national security threats enter the country. That’s when sex trafficking goes up. That’s when, you know, that’s when the fentanyl comes in.”

As for what success practically looks like at the end of the Trump administration, Homan said: “Our success every day is taking a public safety threat off the streets or getting a national security threat out of here.”

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — New York Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter to health care providers, calling on medical institutions to continue providing gender-affirming care amid reports, according the attorney general’s office, that several providers in the state had stopped providing treatments following a President Donald Trump executive order.

James reminded providers in a Monday letter “to comply with New York law … [providers] must continue to provide health care services, including gender affirming care, to transgender or gender nonconforming individuals.”

They must provide care regardless “of the availability of federal funding,” James told providers, noting that New York State laws prohibit discrimination, which includes “withholding the availability of services from transgender individuals based on their gender identity or their diagnosis of gender dysphoria, while offering such services to cisgender individuals.”

In a Jan. 28 executive order, Trump threatened to stop providing federal funding and grants to medical institutions that provided gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19.

Trump’s executive order does not restrict puberty blockers, hormone therapies, or surgeries for cisgender patients under the age of 19.

On Jan. 31, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to stop Trump’s efforts to freeze federal funding, saying that the freeze is likely a violation of the Constitution.

James’ office told providers in her letter that the temporary restraining order applied to both current and future grants of federal assistance and that funding cannot be frozen or withdrawn as it applies to providing gender affirming care to minors.

The executive order against gender-affirming care is the latest action from Trump that impacts the transgender community, which is estimated to make up less than 1% of the U.S. population over the age of 13.

Trump also recently signed executive orders restricting transgender participation in the military, ending federal legal recognition of transgender people, and restricting gender marker changes on federal documents.

James was one of 22 state attorneys general behind the lawsuit aiming to halt the implementation of the Trump administration’s policies freezing federal agency grants and financial assistance.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — The battle between New York federal prosecutors and President Donald Trump’s Justice Department continued Friday as another prosecutor resigned over the order to dismiss Mayor Eric Adams’ bribery case.

Hagan Scotten, the assistant United States attorney for Southern District of New York, blasted Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove in a letter one day after acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned over her refusal to follow through with the Justice Department’s request.

“In short, the first justification for the motion — that [former U.S. Attorney] Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under different U.S. attorneys is so weak as to be transparently pretextual,” Scotten wrote.

“The second justification is worse. No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” he added.

Scotten, an Army veteran who served in Iraq and clerked under Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, chastised the president and the administration.

“I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal,” he wrote.

“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me,” he added.

The letter came hours after what several former and current federal justice officials dubbed the “Thursday afternoon massacre,” when six people involved with the case resigned and pushed back against the U.S. attorney general’s office.

Sassoon resigned Thursday over the Justice Department’s request to end the federal bribery case against the mayor.

The Justice Department planned to remove the prosecutors handling the mayor’s case and reassign it to the Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C.

However, as soon the Public Integrity Section was informed it would be taking over, John Keller, the acting head of the unit, and his boss, Kevin Driscoll, the most senior career official in the criminal division, resigned along with three other members of the unit, according to multiple sources.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has the power to remove Adams from office, called the Department of Justice’s moves “unbelievably unprecedented” during an interview on MSNBC Thursday night.

“This is not supposed to happen in our system of justice,” she told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Hochul, however, declined to discuss the possibility of removing the mayor.

“The allegations are extremely concerning and serious. But I cannot, as the governor of this state, have a knee-jerk, politically motivated reaction, like a lot of other people are saying right now,” she said. “I have to do it smart, what’s right, and I’m consulting with other leaders in government at this time.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime ally of Adams, said in a statement Tuesday that he was convening with other Black clergy to discuss the situation but he already raised concerns about the mayor’s allegiances.

“President Trump is holding the mayor hostage,” Sharpton said.

Four prominent New York City Black clergy members — the Revs. Johnnie Green, Kevin McCall, Carl L. Washington and Adolphus Lacey — wrote a letter Wednesday calling on the mayor not to run for reelection this year.

“Eric Adams had every right to prove his innocence and many of us were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but that’s not what has happened,” they wrote.

Adams, a former NYPD officer and Democrat who previously registered as a Republican, was accused by federal prosecutors of taking lavish flights and hotel stays from Turkish businessmen and officials for more than a decade.

He and his staff members also allegedly received straw campaign donations to become eligible for New York City’s matching funds program for his campaigns, according to the criminal indictment that was issued in September.

In exchange, Adams allegedly used his power as Brooklyn borough president and later as mayor to give the foreign conspirators preferential treatment for various projects and proposals, including permits for the Turkish consulate despite fire safety concerns, the indictment said.

Adams pleaded not guilty, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and claimed without any basis that he was being politically targeted by the Biden administration, even though the probe covers many years before Biden was in office.

Adams’ primary opponents have called for him to step down since the indictment, as have other New York Democrats, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The mayor, however, appeared on “Fox and Friends” on Friday with Trump “border czar” Thomas Homan and reiterated he was not only staying in office but he would run for reelection as a Democrat. The deadline to change parties is Friday.

“People had me gone months ago, but, you know what, I’m sitting on your couch,” Adams told the hosts.

The mayor remained silent during the interview when Homan discussed Trump’s deportation policy and called on Hochul to resign for not cooperating with the federal office.

Adams, however, did light up and smile when the “border czar” discussed their partnership. The mayor announced Thursday the city would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into Rikers Island jail, a major shift in the city’s policies.

“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch,” Homan said with a laugh. “I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?'”

Sassoon prosecutor warned in a letter that the close relationship between the Trump administration and Adams crossed a line.

In her letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Sassoon repeatedly suggested Justice Department leadership, including Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, was explicitly aware of a quid pro quo that was suggested by Adams’ attorneys.

Sassoon alleged Adams’ vocal support of Trump’s immigration policies would be boosted by dismissing the indictment against him.

Sassoon’s letter detailed a January meeting with Bove and counsel for the mayor, where she says Adams’ attorneys put forward “what amounted to a quid pro quo,” after which Bove “admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.”

“Although Mr. Bove disclaimed any intention to exchange leniency in this case for Adams’s assistance in enforcing federal law, that is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo,” Sassoon wrote in her letter.

Bove accused Sassoon of insubordination and rejected her claims. Trump told reporters Thursday he was not involved with the Justice Department decisions this week and claimed the SDNY prosecutor was fired, although he did not name her.

Adams also denied the allegations Friday.

“It took her three weeks to report in front of her a criminal action. Come on, this is silly,” he told the “Fox and Friends” hosts.

The dismissal, which is without prejudice, meaning it can be brought again, specifically after the November election, according to Bove’s request, has yet to be formally filed in court or reviewed by a judge.

ABC News’ Oren Oppenheim contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.