ANTIGO — The Republican Party of Langlade County (RPLC) hosted several prominent conservative figures at its Lincoln — Reagan — Trump Dinner Saturday night at Northstar Lanes.
Over 200 people attended the event, a fundraiser for the RPLC, which was emceed by conservative radio host Joe Giganti and featured speeches from a number of conservative politicians like former Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Tim Ramthun and U.S. Congressman Tom Tiffany.
The dinner’s keynote speaker was Tom Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first two years of the Donald Trump presidency, who spent much of his speech criticizing the Joe Biden administration’s immigration policies, which he said led to the current influx of migrants into the country through the United States’ southern border.
“Every president I worked for took steps to try to secure the border,” Homan said in his speech.
“Nobody did more than Trump. Under President Trump, illegal immigration was down 83 to 90 percent — unprecedented success. And we handed the administration the most secure border in my lifetime.”
Homan began his career as a police officer in New York before joining the U.S. Border Patrol and rising steadily through the ranks, eventually receiving prestigious accolades such as the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the Law Enforcement Person of the Year.
Homan, who frequently appears on Fox News, said the repercussions of the border crisis were far-reaching and can not be solved until Biden is voted out of office.
“Doctors without Borders, which is a nonpartisan organization, they talked to thousands of women that were smuggled across the border. Thirty-one percent of women that were smuggled through the cartels admitted to being sexually assaulted. If 31 percent admitted it, how many actually got sexually assaulted?” Homan said. “So when Trump had illegal immigration down 83 to 90 percent, when 90 percent less people come in, how many women don’t get raped? How many children don’t drown in the river? How many Americans don’t die of fentanyl overdose because our border’s secure? How many known terrorists didn’t make it into the country because our border was secure? How many millions of dollars did the cartels not make? How many women and children didn’t get sex trafficked into the United States? President Trump’s policy saved lives, thousands of them.”
Homan’s’ speech included anecdotes from human trafficking cases he investigated, including 2003 a case during which 19 illegal immigrants were found dead near Victoria, Texas in and around a sweltering tractor-trailer they had been packed into for hours during the crossing, one of the deadliest documented human trafficking incidents in American history.
“In my walk to the crime scene, there were four bodies on the ground because as the door was being opened up, people were trying to get air so bad that they were pushing bodies out and they were landing on the ground,” Homan said. “As I peer into the tractor-trailer, I see all these dead people, and my eyes key in on a little boy who was five years old. I remember it to this day because he was wearing yellow batman underwear, and I remember that because my son had the same underwear…I got to the little boy and I knelt down and hugged him. I said a prayer for him because I knew that that boy had suffered badly. Everybody did. Everybody was in their underwear. It was 180 degrees, in a steel box.”
Tiffany said he believes the Biden administration’s immigration policies could swing November’s election.
“I think it’s the key issue before the American people this year, having a borderless country and everything that comes with it. We see a small community in Wisconsin like Whitewater with 15,000 people, they’re overrun. They’re begging the president, ‘Will you please stop this?’ Fentanyl, the number one killer of young people across America, that is because of a border that isn’t secure,” Tiffany said.
Leonard Boltz, the chairman of the Republican Party of Langlade County, also characterized the border as a key 2024 issue, and said Homan could very well return as ICE director in a potential second term for Trump.
“We’re hoping when Trump wins that he’ll call on Mr. Homan to close our border and stop the lawlessness that’s been going on with 10,000 or more illegals coming across the border every single day,” Boltz said. “That would be like more people than the size of Antigo every day flooding into our country.”
Homan said if Trump were to be reelected and requested he return to ICE, he would.
Most Popular
Comments / 0