Confirmed as White House Border Czar in 2025, these are the individuals shaping the decisions that undermine democracy.
Summary:
Former ICE Director Tom Homan has been announced as the second Trump administration’s “border czar,” and will be in charge of overseeing the northern and southern borders, along with maritime and aviation security. According to Trump, Homan “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.” Homan has a long history of making extremely bigoted comments about immigrants, ran his own anti-immigrant outfit Border911, and loves to post cheerful threats about deportations. As early as 2014, he advocated for immigrant children to be separated from their families as an effective way to deter undocumented migrants. He has threatened public officials with jail if they get in his way, telling the mayor of Denver in November, “I’m willing to put him in jail” for protesting deportation orders. Homan is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which produced the authoritarian blueprint Project 2025, which calls for immigrant roundups and detention camps. For the purposes of this ominous mass deportation plan, Trump’s selection of Homan represents a serious threat to migrants in the United States and to American values, especially considering his war-like rhetoric about the border, and his work at the anti-immigrant “Border911” organization, of which he is CEO.
In His Own Words:
“All he has to do is look at Arizona v. U.S. and he would see he’s breaking the law…but, look, me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing. He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail”
– Homan threatening to imprison Denver Mayor Mike Johnson after he vowed to protect his city’s migrants, November 2024
“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
– Homan’s speech at NatCon, July 2024
“As a guy who spent 34 years deporting illegal aliens, I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country in violation of federal law: you better start packing now – you’re damn right – because you’re going home.”
– Homan’s speech at the RNC Convention, 2024
“This is the biggest national security vulnerability this nation has seen since 9/11. We have to fix it.”
– Homan interviewed on FOX News, November 2024
“You can come, but you’re gonna be arrested. You’re not gonna be released, and we’re gonna remove you. It’s not gonna be like the Biden administration… You’re not walking away. We’re gonna lock you up.”
– Homan on 7News. November 2024
“If you’re in the country illegally, you shouldn’t feel comfortable. Absolutely not. I won’t feel comfortable if I’m in the country illegally. If I, if I’m in, if I’m in some other country illegally, I’m not gonna be comfortable. You shouldn’t be comfortable either. ’cause when you enter this country illegally, you have committed a crime. You are a criminal and you’re not off the table.”
– Homan on Sean Hannity. November 2024
“We’re gonna go get ’em. I saw today numerous, uh, governors from Sanctuary States saying they’re gonna step in the way. They better get the hell outta the way. Either you help us or get the hell outta the way because ICE is going to do their job. We’re gonna take the handcuffs off ICE that the Biden administration put on them and let ICE do what they do that they do best…We’re going to do our job despite the politics. We’re doing it. So get used to it. ‘Cause we’re coming.”
– Homan on Sean Hannity. November 2024
“If you wanna self deport, you should self deport because again, we know who you are and we’re going to come and find you. So if you wanna self deport, that’s fine.”
– Homan on Sean Hannity. November 2024
“It truly is a broken system, and that’s because it is broken by design. People that say this administration has failed on immigration don’t understand. Biden and Mayorkas haven’t failed at all. Quite the opposite, their plan is succeeding.”
– Tom Homan, How Biden, Mayorkas Broke Our Immigration System From the Inside Out, The Heritage Foundation, June 2023
“Biden’s open borders are by design.”
– Tom Homan, Biden’s Open Borders Betrayal, The Heritage Foundation, October 2022
“The goal wasn’t to traumatize… The goal was to stop the madness, stop the death, stop the rape, stop the children dying, stop the cartels doing what they’re doing.”
– Justifying the family separation policy, 2022
“The border is our theater of war.”
– Tom Homan on Twitter(2), November 2023
“You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down 🎶
https://border911.com
The border is our theater of war.”
– Tom Homan on Twitter, November 2023
Homan’s “Activism” Aligns With Extremists
Homan has made a career out of pushing anti-immigrant rhetoric and advocating for harsh policies against undocumented migrants. He has participated in far-right conferences that featured white supremacists and other extremists, and partnered with extremist foundations. At one point, he pulled out of an event put on by a neo-Nazi, but not because of the Naziism, but rather because the group’s leader praised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Starting in 2020, Homan began serving as a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), the legal arm of the anti-immigrant group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). FAIR was founded by white nationalist John Tanton, and has a long track record of bigoted statements about immigrants.
Homan views immigration as an “invasion,” citing Biden as its facilitator (“Biden’s open borders are by design”), and views himself as fighting a war against it. In 2022, Homan attempted to consult with Texas Governor Greg Abbott about invoking Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which allows states to “keep Troops” and “engage in War” if “invaded,” asking “Is there a way to use this clause within the Constitution where it talks about invasion?”
Also in 2022, Homan launched a border-focused project called “Defend the Border and Save Lives” in collaboration with the anti-Muslim group The United West. The project, which shared staff and an address with The United West, held a fundraising event at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022. The Defend the Border and Save Lives website was riddled with anti-immigrant content and its donation page read, “AMERICA INVADED. Help Us Stop This Threat!”
The United West was known for promoting inflammatory rhetoric about immigration and Muslims. Staffers associated with Defend the Border and Save Lives included Clare Lopez, a former CIA analyst turned anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who described mosques as “centers for indoctrination, the dispensing of Sharia justice, the stockpiling of weapons, and the launching of jihad.” The project’s director of operations was Mary Wierbicki, who also served as social media director for The United West and co-founded Sharia Crime Stoppers.
Homan’s extremism is also reflected in his associations. Homan was scheduled to speak at Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) in 2023, arrived at the conference, and then backed out, citing Fuentes’ praise of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Homan declined to condemn Fuentes, his followers called Groypers, and their overtly hateful views, even attempting to make it clear to Huffington Post’s senior editor that he was “not denouncing Fuentes.” Rather, Homan is apparently just a guy that “like[s] secure borders.”
Homan is currently listed as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which produced the authoritarian blueprint Project 2025 that calls for immigrant roundups and detention camps. While there, Homan contributed to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” and published and contributed to several commentary pieces about the “border crisis” and border security from 2022 to 2024.
In October 2024, Homan attended the MAGA Rod of Iron Freedom Festival hosted by a Christian gun cult called “Rod of Iron Ministries.” Their leader, Rev. Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, the son of Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Moonies, wears a crown of bullets. He told the audience “In John Chapter 2, we see that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is an assault weapons manufacturer.” Coincidentally, so is Sean, and he manufactures a commemorative Trump AR-15. Other attendees included Ivan Raiklin, an election denier with a worrying history of politically violent rhetoric, Jack Posobiec, a MAGA influencer who has a history of spreading antisemitism and endorsing the white supremacist 14 words slogan,“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” and Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s pick for head of counter-terrorism, who inherited the Order of Vitez from his father, a Hungarian honor that the State Department itself deemed to have serious connections to the Nazi occupation and enabling the Holocaust during World War II.
In December 2024, Richard Mack, founder of the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), spoke to Roger Stone on the StoneZone podcast claiming he had “several conversations” with Homan about conducting mass deportations. Mack was a founding member of the antigovernment militia the Oathkeepers, many of whose leaders have been imprisoned for their roles in the January 6th insurrection. Mack, along with other CSPOA, members participated in the 2014 stand-off with the federal government at the Bundy ranch in Nevada. In the past, Mack has had ties with local Tea Party groups, the conspiracist John Birch Society, and appeared on The Alex Jones Show.
Homan is also a member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s (TPPF) Border Security Coalition. TPPF has a radically conservative set of values, railing against public education, rejecting pandemic health measures, and feeding into Trump’s election denialism through the formation of the Election Protection Project, which they claim is “an effort to bolster ballot integrity in the Lone Star State and nationwide.”
Makings Of A Tyrant
Homan has a robust law enforcement background, following in his father’s footsteps. Homan earned an associate degree in criminal justice at Jefferson Community College in 1979 and then a bachelor’s degree at the Utica-Rome State College of Technology. He worked as a police officer in West Carthage, N.Y., before becoming a border patrol agent with the Narcotic Task Force, based in Phoenix, Ariz. in 1984. While with the Narcotic Task Force, Homan made a name for himself making, at the time, the largest Mexican border drug seizure, apprehending over 1,000 pounds of cocaine with an estimated $75 million in street value.
In 2013, Homan was appointed by the Obama administration to lead ICE’s deportation branch, where he “carried out record numbers of formal deportations.” It’s reported he deported over 920,000 migrants, and arrested and deported over 534,000 migrants with criminal records during that time.
He began pushing the idea of a family separation policy as early as 2014 and has been described as the “intellectual father” of the policy, which he outlined years before it was adopted by the Trump administration. “Most parents don’t want to be separated,” Homan said, making separation an effective tool for immigration enforcement: “I’d be lying to you if I didn’t think that would have an effect.” He later attempted to justify the inhumane policy, claiming “the goal wasn’t to traumatize,” but rather to “stop the madness” caused by immigration.
Homan was named acting director of ICE during Trump’s first administration. In May 2017, he announced ICE had arrested 41,319 people between Inauguration Day and the end of April, a 38 percent increase from the same period the year before. The following month, Homan said that illegal immigrants “should be afraid.”
Homan finally got his wish to separate families during the Trump era, where he was a key architect, along with Stephan Miller, Trump’s new White House deputy chief of staff, behind its family separation policy, otherwise known as the “zero tolerance” policy. This policy, enacted in secret until 2018, led to thousands of children being ripped from their parents and moved into detention facilities. Even after parents were prosecuted, under Homan’s purview, officials worked to keep families separated despite their claims that families must only be separated during the prosecution process. Hundreds of families are reportedly still separated because of the zero tolerance policy. When asked recently whether there was a way to carry out deportations without separating families, Homan said, “Families can be deported together.”
Homan also called for the arrests of local and state officials who did not comply with federal immigration agents in their deportation efforts, calling it a “victimization of the American community.” This mainly applies to “sanctuary” cities and states, like California, which enacted a law to limit law enforcement’s ability to detain suspected undocumented migrants on ICE’s behalf. Homan left ICE in June 2018 after announcing his retirement earlier that year.
Homan had no plans to stay idle during his “retirement,” joining Fox News as a contributor in 2018, and especially leading up to the 2024 election, founding the non-profit organization Border911 in October 2023. Border911 claims to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border.” Before becoming its own foundation, Border911 was part of “The America Project,” which was created by several election deniers, including Patrick Byrne, founder of overstock.com and a notorious conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer, and Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty (but was then pardoned by Trump) to lying to the FBI about contacts with the Russian ambassador. The America Project not only pushes election disinformation, but it helped to raise funds to support supposed “political hostages” (i.e., insurrectionists) who were arrested at the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots.
Over the past year with Border911, Homan canvassed the country, focusing on election battleground states, with a team of former law enforcement officers to spread a narrative that migrants coming across the border are an “invasion,” and that democrats are facilitating it in order to gain their favour in upcoming elections, therefore allowing them to “be in power for years to come.” In Homan’s tweets advertising Border911, he invoked war-like language, typically signing off tweets about the organization with “The border is our theater of war.”
These tours, and online content, showcased Homan’s clear affinity towards Trump and his advocacy of inhumane border policies. Homan made a clear effort to boost Trump’s support, including holding a Border911 gala at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida, with Trump attending. Homan has also said in a video posted onto the Border911 website, “No one did more to secure this country than Donald Trump; I’m a Trump guy.” In another video, Homan says, “I’m hoping to God in January 2025, we’re going to have somebody back in the White House that’s going to let [Border Patrol agents] do their job.”
Border911 hasn’t been afraid to ally itself with famous election denialist-run organizations, such as Mike Lindell’s election denial organizations and the America First Warehouse, an event venue and production studio which claims “Trump won handily” in the 2020 election.
Recently galvanized by Trump’s victory, Homan harkened back to his previous threats made against sanctuary cities and states by threatening to imprison Denver, Colo., Mayor Mike Johnson after he vowed to protect migrants in the city. He also affirmed that Trump will cut federal funding to states which do not “cooperate” with ICE in their mass deportation efforts, warning mayors and governors of sanctuary cities and states to “get the hell outta the way.”
