2paragraph News: News, Politics, Entertainment, TV, Celebrity, Culture

FOLLOW @ APPLE | MSN | FLIPBOARD | GOOGLE

Trump’s Border Czar Lets Dr. Phil Question Arrested Migrant in Raid, “Absurd”

by in Daily Edition | January 27, 2025

Tom Homan

Tom Homan, Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

President Donald Trump has acted quickly to sweep up migrants for questioning and potential deportation, with newly appointed border czar Tom Homan taking a hard line and admitting that their will be “collateral” people caught up in the ICE sweeps — that is, people who are in the country legally will be detained as ICE uses a hammer instead of a scalpel to move on migrant communities.

But if the sweeps are to identify and get rid of migrants who are criminals, Trump — who rose to national prominence as a TV star — also always has one eye on optics.

And the strange presence of TV psychologist Dr. Phil as he accompanies Homan on the rounds in Chicago shows that Trump remains as interested in sweeps week as the migrant sweeps.

Dr. Phil is filming the ICE activities for his show, but his proximity and seemingly equal stature with Homan during the video below has people questioning what is going on — and the legitimacy of the proceedings.

It’s Dr. Phil, not an ICE figure or local law enforcement officer, who interrogates a man identified as a “Thailandese” migrant who we are told has been charged with “sex crimes.”

Dr. Phil asks the man three times if he has ever been deported from the United States, a question that receives a “no” answer each time.

Homan steps in to explain that “this is an example of sanctuary cities, right? We’ve got an illegal alien, convicted of sex crimes involving children and he’s walking the streets of Chicago. That’s the downfall, the problem, of a sanctuary city is that people are just walking the street rather than local law enforcement working with federal agents.”

But even X accounts like SarasotaFreedom, whose posts are uniformly pro-deportation and anti-sanctuary city, assert that Dr. Phil’s presence is “absurd.”

MAGA Mama Bear types like the account below are grateful for the street cleanup, and thank the “men and women protecting our streets” — though she isn’t clear whether she considers Dr. Phil part of the protection detail.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker comes under fire for an alleged failure to have done enough to clean the streets up himself. And even some of those seemingly sympathetic to legal immigrants are blaming the purported failures of Democrats for the “collateral” damage Homan describes as inevitable.

One commenter writes: “it really pisses me off that law abiding immigrants are going to suffer because democrats refused to deport child molesters.”

Yet there are many who respond that the mere presence of Dr. Phil mocks the seriousness of the sweep, though these people likely discount — as Trump does not — how much more attention this footage gets due to his presence.

And then there is the accusation, ever more common, that everything has become about monetizing the current situation and using America’s challenges to further enrich the richest Americans. One account says: “Dr. Phil making money off of people suffering is so Dr Phil.”

An account called History Matters questioned whether the presence of Dr. Phil and Trump’s new appointee Homan aren’t, in reality, the only thing that’s new about this kind of law enforcement, writing: “These raids have been happening for years under the last three administrations.”

Supporting this are data showing deportations from the U.S. reached a peak under Democratic President Barack Obama when the U.S. deported a record 438,421 unauthorized immigrants in fiscal year 2013. More than 3 million immigrants were deported while Obama was president.