Trump Puts the Father of Family Separation in Charge of Mass Deportation
Former US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan.John Bazemore/AP
Late Sunday night, President-elect Donald Trump announced one of his top picks to staff the incoming administration: Tom Homan as the “border czar.” Homan “will be in charge of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin,” Trump posted on social media. “I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long-awaited-for, job.”
There was no surprise there. Having served as acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term, Homan has been vying for the job since leaving government. He joined the Heritage Foundation as a fellow and became a Project 2025 contributor while launching his own anti-immigration enterprise that spread fearmongering about a “border invasion.” Homan has made no secret of his enthusiasm for this new position with the administration. “Trump comes back in January,” Homan bragged at a conservative conference this summer. “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”
Throughout his campaign, Trump vowed to start a mass deportation campaign on day one and, as Homan has noted, “no one is off the table.” The tough-looking and tough-talking man soon to be tasked with realizing Trump’s promise to detain and remove an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants from the United States has a long career in law enforcement and within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
During the Obama administration, which deported a record number of people, he served as head of the ICE branch charged with arresting and deporting immigrants. For his work, he even won the nation’s highest civil service award. “Thomas Homan deports people,” declared a 2016 profile about him in the Washington Post. “And he’s really good at it.” (Homan reportedly keeps a framed copy of the story in his office.) After taking office, Trump said he had heard people describe Homan as “nasty” looking, and said, “That’s what I’m looking for.”
Homan is the intellectual father of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of children from their parents at the border—more than 1,300 of them remain apart even today. “I’m sick and tired [of] hearing about the family separation,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year. “I’m still being sued over that, so come get me. I don’t give a shit, right? Bottom line is: We enforced the law.” As far as Homan is concerned, families who crossed the border “chose to separate themselves.”
In interviews, Homan has further underscored his indifference to the human cost of such policies. When asked on 60 Minutes whether it was possible to carry out mass deportation without separating families, he fired back: “Of course there is—families can be deported together.” What this cavalier response conveniently ignores is that millions of US-born children live in mixed-status households with at least one undocumented parent.
Recently, after Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said the state police wouldn’t assist the federal government with carrying out sweeping deportations, Homan suggested politicians in states led by Democrats should “get the hell out of the way.”
“If we can’t get assistance from New York City,” he told Fox News, “we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. Because we’re going to do the job. We’re going to do the job without you or with you.”