Who is Tom Homan? Trump’s pugnacious ‘border tsar’ who took on the Left

The 62-year old former acting ICE director now has his chance to fix America’s immigration problem

At a Donald Trump rally in 2022, Tom Homan revealed that the Republican had tasked him with closing the US border in 60 days.
“I’ll tell you what I told the president. He comes back, I come back, we fix this s—t,” Mr Homan, the plain-spoken former head of immigration enforcement, declared at the West Palm Beach event.
Mr Trump did not even announce he was running for the White House until the following month, but the incident shows how long he has been eyeing the 62-year-old bruiser for a top role in his administration.
Mr Homan now has his chance. On Sunday, the president-elect revealed he would become the “immigration tsar” in one of the new administration’s first appointments.
Since his election victory last week, Mr Trump’s aides have been reviewing media appearances of potential appointees as they search for officials who will publicly defend their boss.
A team of advisers has assembled in Las Vegas to go through the TV interviews of those tipped to play a key role in the administration, according to the Wall Street Journal.
An immigration hawk who is equally unsparing on interviewers, there is little wonder that Mr Homan is one of the first appointments.
He began his career as a police officer in New York before joining the border patrol in 1984, crediting those decades in immigration enforcement with developing his tough-on-crime philosophy.
Mr Trump elevated him to the top role at immigration and customs enforcement (ICE), where he became the face of its hugely controversial programme of separating children who crossed the border illegally from their families.
He was unapologetic when, a year after leaving the White House, he was confronted by New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the “kids in cages” programme.
Images of the tiny figures kept in chain-link enclosures caused outrage when they were published in 2018 – even provoking criticism from Melania Trump, the then-first lady.
Mr Trump blinked in June, signing an executive order to end the policy.
Mr Homan was not so easily cowed when he was interrogated by congressional Democrats in 2019.
“If I get arrested for DUI and I have a young child in the car, I will be separated,” he said in a pugnacious performance in front of the House oversight committee.
“When I was a policy officer in New York and I arrested a father for domestic violence, I separated that father from his family.”
Ms Ocasio-Cortez is known for her impassioned performances but faltered in the face of Mr Homan’s terse answers and no-nonsense attitude.
While Mr Homan may have been content to put children in cages, he took no prisoners at the committee hearing.
“You want to seek asylum, go through a port of entry,” he said bluntly, unimpressed as Ms Ocasio-Cortez argued that asylum seekers were not criminals. “Do it a legal way.”
Mr Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform late on Sunday: “I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our borders.
“Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin. Congratulations to Tom. I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long awaited for, job.”
His return to government raises questions about the return of family separation, with Mr Trump having been reported to have regretted ending the policy in his first term.
Mr Homan told 60 Minutes, a week before being tapped for his latest role, that the US government should “absolutely” consider reinstating the practice.
“I’m sick and tired hearing about the family separation,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference last year, unrepentant. “You know, I’m still being sued over that, so come get me. I don’t give a s—t, right. Bottom line is, we enforced the law.”
Mr Homan was the “intellectual father” of the policy and had proposed it as far back as 2014, according to The Atlantic. He had been appointed a year before by Barack Obama as executive associate director of immigration enforcement.
Although Mr Homan looks and acts like a bulldog, he spent time in therapy after investigating one of the US’s deadliest human trafficking incidents.
In 2003, Mr Homan was sent down to the border in southeast Texas, where he found 17 dead migrants, including a five-year-old, who had been packed like sardines into an overheated lorry.
“I got down on my knees, put my hand on the child’s head, and said a prayer, because I could only imagine what his last hour of life must have been like, how scared he must have been,” he told The Atlantic.
“Couldn’t breathe, pitch black, begging his father to help him. His father couldn’t help. What was his father thinking? He’d put him in that position.”
Child separation was not meant to “traumatise”, he insisted – it was a deterrent to deadly border crossings. “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.”
Mr Homan left the White House the same month that Mr Trump ended family separation, although his departure does not seem to have been connected with the U-turn.
He joined the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and contributed to its Project 2025 policy document. Democrats had claimed that it was a blueprint for a second Trump ter, prompting furious denials from the Republican.