Donald Trump announced on Sunday that he is appointing former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan to serve as his “border czar,” saying Homan will be “in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”
“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
Homan, a Project 2025 contributor, ran ICE when Trump first took office in 2017.
While in the Trump administration, Homan is considered the “father” of Trump's “zero tolerance” border policy, which led to thousands of unnecessary and inhumane family separations. It took months for many of the children who were separated from their parents to reunite with their families, leading to agonizing images of children in cages in detention facilities without their parents.
He also made menacing comments to immigrants, saying at a congressional hearing in 2017 that they “should be worried.”
“If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by being in this country, you should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder. You need to be worried,” Homan said in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee. “No population is off the table.”
When asked later by CNN if he regretted those comments, Homan said no.
“It needed to be said,” Homan told CNN in June 2017.
Homan lasted only 17 months in the Trump administration the first time around. According to The Washington Post, Homan “retired in frustration when the White House failed to move his nomination toward Senate confirmation.”
But now Homan will be back, and is gung-ho on Trump’s plan to carry out mass deportations.
In February 2023, before Trump officially became the GOP nominee, Homan bragged to right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk that he would be back in a future Trump administration to help deport immigrants.
“I’m going to run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen,” Homan said.
He also spoke during the Republican National Convention in July, declaring in a speech, “I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country … You better start packing now.”
Of course, experts say it will be extremely expensive to run a mass-deportation operation, costing almost $11,000 per immigrant.
It’s also logistically difficult.
Homan said on Fox News on Sunday that the deportation plan would be “a well-targeted, planned operation ... by the men of ICE.”
But a number of undocumented immigrants have family members here legally, meaning deportations could once again separate families.
CBS News asked Homan about this in an interview that aired on “60 Minutes” before the election.
“Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” CBS’ Cecilia Vega asked Homan.
To which Homan replied, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”
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Written by Emily Singer of the Daily Kos staff. Cross-posted from Daily Kos.
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