Homan defers to Trump on legal status for millions of immigrants

Border czar Tom Homan left President Donald Trump to answer the biggest immigration question now hanging over the White House: whether any undocumented immigrants who have kept their heads down and stayed out of trouble could win legal status.

“There’s discussions going on,” Homan told CBS News immigration correspondent Camilo Montoya-Galvez. “I’m involved with some and not others, but I’m not going to get ahead of the president on this.” The comments suggested that aides are at least debating whether to carve out relief for some law-abiding immigrants, a politically volatile idea that would immediately collide with the administration’s hard-line enforcement message.

The stakes are enormous because the Trump administration has spent its first year back in office tightening immigration policy far beyond people living in the country illegally. It has revoked parole protections for 985,000 migrants who entered through the Biden-era CBP One app, and a federal judge in Boston, Allison Burroughs, ordered the administration on April 1 to restore the legal status of migrants admitted under that program. At the same time, the White House has also moved against legal immigration pathways and temporary status programs, making the system more hostile to immigrants across legal categories, according to immigration-policy analysts cited in the reporting.

That backdrop matters because any opening for undocumented immigrants would affect a population estimated at 11 million people in the United States, many of them long-settled workers and family members. It would also revive a fight Republicans have been waging for more than a decade. A bipartisan Senate immigration bill in 2013, derided by critics as amnesty, proposed a 13-year path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally, and the word still shapes how any new status proposal is framed.

For now, Homan’s remarks do not amount to a policy shift. They do show that internal discussions are happening inside an administration that has otherwise leaned into detention, deportation and status revocations, including a 2025 operation to end some migrants’ immigration court cases so they could be arrested and fast-tracked for removal. Any move to protect some undocumented immigrants would draw fire from immigration hard-liners, while business groups, immigrant advocates and mixed-status families would read the signal very differently. The question is whether Trump is testing the waters or preparing a real break from the enforcement-first script that has defined his return to power.