In 2016, Thomas D. Homan was a frustrated transportation executive who was ready to give up.
A former border patrol agent with a strong lawman’s demeanor, he was the wrong person to run for Obama. Senior officials called him when they wanted a hard liner. But his proposals – including an early version of the controversial family separation policy to curb immigration – were often rejected.
Over the years, the rise of Donald J. Trump has completely freed Mr. Homan and his ideas. In the first management of Mr. Trump, Mr. Homan helped make the family separation policy a chaotic reality. And in the second, Mr. Homan is poised to become the “border king” in the White House, tasked with fulfilling the incoming president’s promise to run the largest campaign in American history.
The rise of Mr. Homan completes his transition from a Democratic administration official to a full-on Trump world president.
Where he once signed guidelines for transgender care and Obama’s immigration policy, he now aligns with far-right views on immigration and elections. He boasted that he does not mind being criticized for the policy of separating families.
When he was first approached about joining the second Trump administration, Mr. Homan says he told Mr. Trump said he was so angry about the border that “I’ll come back free.”
Mr. Homan, whose position does not require Senate confirmation, acknowledged that his job is unlikely, at least in four years. Mr. Trump has vowed to remove all of the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally – which experts say is far-fetched and incredibly disruptive if not done.
However, Mr. Homan has outlined plans for a more aggressive campaign. He said he intends to focus on “the worst” deportations – people arrested on non-immigration charges, people who already have deportation orders, and the 2 million others who are considered a security risk.
But he also promised that the effort’s reach would eventually be broader.
He says he has met with technology executives about tools to find undocumented immigrants, such as facial recognition software or license-plate readers. He suggested that people call to report neighbors who suspect that they are living in the country illegally.
He has threatened to arrest state and local leaders who try to stop immigration and Customs Enforcement. And if ICE officials can’t rely on local help, they’ll go into communities to find their targets, he said.
Sometimes, Mr. Homan, who is 63 years old, has muted Mr. However, Mr. Homan has made it clear that his goal is the same: to fire as many people as possible, and to make no concessions to his critics.
“The talk is tough but it has to be tough,” Mr. Homan told The New York Times in an interview. “Everything I say I mean.”
Pursuing Smugglers, Not Immigrants
Mr. Homan grew up in West Carthage, a farming town in upstate New York about 40 kilometers from the Canadian border, and was a police officer there, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather.
By the 1990s, he was an immigration enforcement agent, working to disrupt smugglers at the southern border. His colleagues remember him sympathizing with the migrants who were caught unawares.
“We certainly did not treat them as hardened criminals,” said Hank Woodrum, Mr. Homan in the Phoenix office of what was then Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “And that was his thought as well.”
As he progressed, Mr. Homan was seen by his superiors as a loyal and kind leader and as one of their own. In 2013, when he became head of ICE’s deportation and immigration enforcement operations, his colleagues in Washington said he faithfully implemented Obama administration policies.
“Tom’s extreme rhetoric is made for cable TV,” said Jeh Johnson, the former homeland security secretary, who once counted Mr. Homan as a trusted advisor.
“Even though he didn’t agree with everything I held, he was willing to support it,” said Mr Johnson. “I relied on Tom to tell me the realities of working on the ground, on the streets and in the cities, and he did.”
Mr. Homan was tasked with selling the Obama administration’s approach to law enforcement, which includes prioritizing immigrants with criminal records rather than targeting all illegal immigrants.
“It makes sense to me, it’s the right thing to do,” he told a House committee in 2013, making a charge that Democrats, including those running for Biden, often make. “If we are built to remove 400,000 people, let’s count those 400,000.”
In 2015, he signed a memo setting standards for care for transgender inmates. It recommended guidance on how to ask someone who they are, as well as addressing their housing preferences, privacy and safety concerns and access to hormone therapy.
As the treatment of transgender prisoners became a party issue, Mr Homan tried to distance himself from the memo.
Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, he said he was ordered to sign it after an argument with Alejandro Mayorkas, then the deputy secretary of homeland security. Mr Mayorkas denied that.
In his interview with The Times, Mr. Homan reiterated his case for revoking the memo but said he did not recall objecting. “Our responsibility is that everyone in our cell needs to be protected,” he said. “I just thought it went too far.”
“My job as a law enforcement officer, not a political appointee, is to work within the political framework provided,” he added.
But Mr. Homan said his dissatisfaction is growing.
In the summer of 2016, he watched as Mr. Trump laid out plans to combat illegal immigration, including building a wall along the southern border.
“Everything he said about illegal immigration was spot on,” Mr. Homan wrote in a 2020 letter.
But he thought Mr. Trump will lose. In October, he said he was so disgusted with the idea of working under the Democratic Party that he handed in his retirement notice and accepted a lucrative job in the private sector.
In January 2017, during his retirement party, Mr. Homan received a call from John Kelly, the incoming Homeland Security secretary, who said the new president wanted Mr. Homan to serve as acting director of ICE.
He agreed and quickly supported the policies of Mr. Trump announced that the agency would apply the law to any undocumented immigrant — not just those with criminal records.
He also accepted parts of the work. At a 2017 event in Sacramento, Calif., a hotbed of resistance to Trump’s immigration policies, he sat next to a local sheriff and told a large crowd that ICE is “not going anywhere.”
The strong speech of Mr. The cruel, sarcastic Homan delighted Mr.
In April 2018, Mr. Homan, along with two other senior leaders, recommended to Homeland Security Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, the policy that led to the separation of families at the border.
In general, the families were not charged with trespassing. They are released pending a court date or detained for a short period of time before being allowed to enter the country. The new policy was intended to keep immigrants from falling in the first place.
After weeks, Mr. Homan stood next to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as Mr. Sessions announcing the policy.
He remained angry and defiant, blaming the episode on the extreme left – “the same people who have no problem tearing a child from its mother’s womb and killing it,” he said in 2023.
Mr. Homan said his time chasing smugglers across the border, and seeing children die trying to cross, strengthened his faith in what he called a “zero tolerance policy”.
“That changed me forever,” he told The Times. “I truly believe that a secure border saves lives because they don’t make that journey. They don’t put themselves in danger.”
Received Right
After leaving the government, Mr. Homan found accepting friends and salary in the political party of Mr. He became a paid contributor to Fox News, defending Mr. Trump on immigration and, for the first time, expressing extreme right-wing views on immigration.
He argued that the Biden administration created an “invasion” on the border by “design,” increasing the number of urban Democrats and strengthening their political power. This assertion resonates with elements of “replacement theory,” the once-held view that elites want to dehumanize white Americans by replacing them with immigrants.
In a congressional hearing last January, Mr. Homan admitted that he had no evidence to support the statement and completely dismissed the replacement theory, which has white nationalist origins.
But speaking to Rods of Iron Ministries, a far-right Christian group, in October, he did not dismiss the label.
“Call it what you want. There must be a reason for not protecting the border,” said Mr. Homan.
In his interview with The Times, Mr. Homan said he did not think the theory he was advocating was the same as the theory of racism. “It is a future political advantage that may be given to one party,” said Mr. Homan. “For me it’s not about race.”
Mr. Homan also became a frequent speaker at the anti-election campaign, and in 2023, he became the chief executive officer of the America Project, an organization co-founded by Michael T. Flynn, a promoter of conspiracy theories, and Patrick Byrne, a leader. the financiers of the parties denied the election.
Mr. Homan began an immigrant-focused program two months later but continued to speak at America Project events.
In an interview, Mr Homan said he does not share any racist or oppositional views and declined to say whether he believes the 2020 election is rigged. He left the America Project because he wanted to focus solely on immigration issues, he said. “You will never find a statement I made that attacks any nationality or religion,” said Mr. Homan.
He opened a consulting business that serves companies looking for contracts related to exports, including those that are ready to benefit from Mr. At one point he was paid between $100,000 and $150,000 to solicit help in Texas for Fisher Industries, a construction company that last year won a $225 million contract with the state to build part of the border wall.
(Mr. Homan said he would not negotiate specific contracts, focusing instead on policy, to avoid accusations of a conflict of interest. He said he was closing his consulting business.)
Preparing to return to government, Mr. Homan contributed to Project 2025, a policy plan that became so controversial during the campaign that Mr. Trump distanced himself from it.
And in speeches and interviews with right-wing activists, he presented his vision for a new expulsion campaign that rejected the policies of his past.
“We’re going to have the biggest deportation this country has ever seen,” Mr Homan told Benny Johnson, a right-wing commentator. “And I won’t apologize for it.”
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