What to know about Tom Homan, Trump’s new “border czar”

Tom Homan, tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be his incoming administration’s “border czar,” is a veteran immigration official and immigration hawk whose law enforcement career spans decades. 

Once a police officer in New York state and Border Patrol agent, the Obama administration tapped him to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation branch in 2013. During Homan’s time at ICE under President Obama, the agency carried out record numbers of formal deportations. Obama gave Homan a Presidential Rank Award, the highest civil service recognition. 

Trump early in his first term named Homan acting director of ICE. He quickly generated controversy when he suggested undocumented immigrants “should be afraid” under the Trump administration. 

Homan was one of the masterminds of the first Trump administration’s infamous “zero tolerance” policy, which led to the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents. The parents were prosecuted for illegal entry, while the children were sent to shelters for unaccompanied minors — without a plan to reunite them. He was one of the three officials who signed the policy memo that then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen approved to greenlight the separations. He left ICE in June 2018.

During an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” last month, Homan outlined how the U.S. government would carry out the largest deportation operation in American history, one of Trump’s signature pledges on the campaign trail. 

“It’s not threatening to the immigrant community,” Homan said of Trump’s campaign promise. “It should be threatening to the illegal immigrant community. But on the heels of [a] historic illegal immigration crisis. That has to be done.”

He suggested to CBS News correspondent Cecilia Vega that he would target criminals and national security threats first, and then seek to deport non-criminal migrants who are in the country illegally and are ordered deported. That would require reversing Biden administration rules that currently instruct ICE to focus on arresting and deporting serious criminals, national security threats and recent border crossers and that effectively shield undocumented immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for a long time without committing serious crimes from deportation. 

Homan also indicated he would revive large-scale immigration arrests at workplaces, which the Biden administration discontinued in 2021. “That’s gonna be necessary,” he said of worksite immigration enforcement.

But Homan said the deportation operation would not involve “concentration camps” or a “mass sweep of neighborhoods.” 

Asked if mass deportations could be carried out without separating families, Homan said, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.” One study shows roughly 4 million U.S. citizen children live with an undocumented parent.