Border czar Tom Homan is facing a backlash in his own hometown of Sackets Harbor, New York, after an immigration raid swept up a mother and her three school-aged children.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection took the family and three others into custody on March 27 in an early-morning raid on a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, a small hamlet on the shores of Lake Ontario, on the western edge of New York’s North Country region. Within days, the mother and her children had been whisked away to Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, a privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas that accommodates families, according to people familiar with the family’s case.
Jefferson County, which includes Sackets Harbor and nearby West Carthage, where Homan grew up, is a deep-red bastion of support for President Donald Trump. Homan has been a prominent and enthusiastic face of Trump’s hard-line border policies, which he kicked off in January with an edict commanding immigration-enforcement agencies like CBP and ICE to ramp up deportations. But now, with that enforcement landing close to home, locals are organizing a rally in support of the family and are planning to march past Homan’s house in Sackets Harbor, according to Corey DeCillis, who chairs the Jefferson County chapter of the New York State Democratic Party.
“People are upset about this,” DeCillis told The Intercept Wednesday. “This is the United States of America, and there’s no kid — or anybody for that matter — that should be treated the way those kids are treated.”
With three students enrolled at the local K-12 school suddenly taken by law enforcement, news of the raid spread rapidly, according to Jennifer Gaffney, superintendent of the Sackets Harbor Central School District.
“The reaction of our students is that they have been traumatized by this,” Gaffney told The Intercept. “Three of their classmates were taken, and they don’t know where they are and they don’t know if they’re going to come back.”
“We’re talking about elementary school, middle school, and high school kids who are all impacted by the absence of their classmates who are detained,” she said.
Gaffney said she learned of the detention of the three students and their mother early on the morning of March 27 and immediately began reaching out to local elected officials to try and locate them, but for several days their whereabouts were uncertain. It was not until Sunday that it emerged that they had been moved to a detention center in Texas that accommodates families.
“It’s been a very, very difficult few days for teachers and staff and students,” Gaffney said. “We’re trying to remain hopeful, but it remains to be seen at this point.”
Neither Gaffney nor CBP provided the names of the family members, citing privacy concerns.
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