In 2016, Thomas D. Homan was a frustrated immigration bureaucrat ready to call it quits.
A former border patrol agent with a lawman’s steely demeanor, he had been an odd fit for the Obama administration. Top officials would call on him when they wanted a hard-liner’s take. But his proposals — including an early version of the controversial family separation policy to deter migrants — were often rejected.
In the years since, Donald J. Trump’s rise has fully unleashed Mr. Homan and his ideas. In Mr. Trump’s first administration, Mr. Homan helped make the family separation policy a chaotic reality. And in the second, Mr. Homan is poised to be the White House “border czar,” tasked with making good on the incoming president’s promise to carry out the largest deportation campaign in American history.
Mr. Homan’s ascent completes his transformation from dutiful official in a Democratic administration to full-throated Trump world fixture.
Where he once signed off on transgender care guidelines and the Obama administration’s targeted immigration policy, he now endorses far-right theories about immigration and elections. He has boasted that he is completely unbothered by criticism of the family separation policy.
When he was first approached about joining a second Trump administration, Mr. Homan says he told Mr. Trump that he was so angry about the border that “I’ll come back for free.”
Mr. Homan, whose post does not require Senate confirmation, has acknowledged his mission is virtually impossible, much less in four years. Mr. Trump has vowed to remove all of the roughly 11 million people in the country illegally — which experts say is far-fetched and would be shockingly disruptive if carried out.
Yet Mr. Homan has described plans for a methodical and aggressive campaign. He has said he intends to focus on deporting “the worst first” — people arrested over crimes unrelated to immigration, people who already have deportation orders, and two million others he deems security risks.
But he has also promised that the effort’s reach would eventually be broader.
He says he already has met with technology executives about tools to find undocumented immigrants, like facial-recognition software or license-plate readers. He has proposed a hotline for people to report neighbors they suspect are living in the country illegally.
He has threatened to arrest state and local leaders who try to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And if ICE officers can’t rely on local help, they will go into communities to find their targets, he has said.
At times, Mr. Homan, who is 63, has tempered Mr. Trump’s talk of using the military or emergency powers for what the president-elect said could be a “bloody story.” Yet Mr. Homan has made clear his goal is the same: deporting as many people as possible, and conceding nothing to his critics.
“The talk is tough but it has to be tough,” Mr. Homan told The New York Times in an interview. “Everything I say I mean.”
Pursuing Smugglers, Not Immigrants
Mr. Homan grew up in West Carthage, a conservative farming town in upstate New York about 40 miles from the Canadian border, and was a police officer there, following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps.
By the 1990s, he was an immigration enforcement agent, working to disrupt smugglers along the southern border. His colleagues remember him as empathizing with migrants who were inadvertently swept up.
“We certainly didn’t treat them like hard-core criminals,” said Hank Woodrum, Mr. Homan’s boss in the Phoenix office of what was then the equivalent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “And that was his thought, too.”
As he advanced, Mr. Homan was seen by rank-and-file officers as a trusted and amiable boss and as one of their own. By 2013, when he was head of deportation operations and immigration enforcement at ICE, colleagues in Washington said he reliably executed the Obama administration’s policies.
“Tom’s extreme rhetoric is made for cable TV,” said Jeh Johnson, the former homeland security secretary, who said he once counted Mr. Homan as a trusted adviser.
“Though he did not agree with everything I concluded, he was prepared to support it,” Mr. Johnson said. “I counted on Tom to tell me the realities of enforcement on the ground, in the streets and cities, and he did.”
Mr. Homan was tasked with selling the Obama administration’s approach to enforcement, including prioritizing immigrants with criminal records rather than targeting all immigrants in the country illegally.
“It makes sense to me, it’s the right thing to do,” he told a House committee in 2013, laying out a case that Democrats, including those in the Biden administration, often make. “If we’re built to remove 400,000 people, let’s make that 400,000 count.”
In 2015, he signed a memo setting standards of care for transgender detainees. It recommended guidance on how to ask someone what they identify as, and on handling their housing preferences, privacy and safety concerns and access to hormone treatments.
As treatment of transgender detainees became a partisan issue, Mr. Homan has tried to distance himself from the memo.
Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, he said he was ordered to sign it after an argument with Alejandro Mayorkas, then the deputy homeland security secretary. Mr. Mayorkas has denied that.
In his interview with The Times, Mr. Homan reiterated his account of pushing back on the memo but said he couldn’t remember what he objected to. “Our responsibility is everybody in our custody needs to be protected,” he said. “I just thought it went too far.”
“My job as a career law enforcement officer, not a political appointee, is to work within the political framework provided,” he added.
But Mr. Homan said his discontent was simmering.
In the summer of 2016, he watched Mr. Trump lay out plans to crack down on illegal immigration, including building a wall on the southern border.
“Everything he said on illegal immigration was right on target,” Mr. Homan wrote in a 2020 book.
But he assumed Mr. Trump would lose. By October, he said, he had become so disgusted by the idea of serving under another Democrat that he submitted his retirement notice and accepted a lucrative private sector job.
In January 2017, during his retirement party, Mr. Homan got a call from John Kelly, the incoming homeland security secretary, who said the new president wanted Mr. Homan to serve as acting director of ICE.
He agreed and quickly backed Mr. Trump’s policies, declaring that the agency would enforce the law against any undocumented immigrant — not just those with criminal records.
He also embraced the performative parts of the job. At a 2017 event in Sacramento, Calif., a hub of resistance to Trump’s immigration policies, he sat next to the local sheriff and told a raucous crowd that ICE wasn’t “going anywhere.”
The burly, scowling Mr. Homan’s tough talk delighted Mr. Trump, who admiringly called him “nasty” and “mean.”
In April 2018, Mr. Homan, along with two other senior leaders, recommended to the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, a policy that led to the separation of families at the border.
Typically, families were not charged with illegal entry. They were either released while awaiting a court date or detained briefly before being allowed into the country. The new policy was meant to keep immigrants from crossing in the first place.
Weeks later, Mr. Homan stood next to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as Mr. Sessions announced the policy.
He remained angry and defiant, blaming the episode on an overzealous left — “the same people who have no problem with separating a baby from the mother’s womb and killing it,” he said in 2023.
Mr. Homan said his time pursuing traffickers at the border, and seeing children die trying to cross, cemented his confidence in what he calls a “zero-tolerance” policy.
”That changed me forever,” he told The Times. “I truly believe a secure border saves lives because they don’t make that journey. They don’t put themselves in harm’s way.”
Embraced by the Right
After leaving government, Mr. Homan found welcoming allies and an income in Mr. Trump’s political movement. He became a paid Fox News contributor, defending Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown and, for the first time, publicly expressing sharply right-wing views on immigration.
He contended that the Biden administration had created an “invasion” at the border “by design,” to increase the population of Democratic cities and bolster their political power. These assertions echoed parts of the “great replacement theory,” the once-fringe notion that elites want to disempower white Americans by replacing them with immigrants.
In a congressional hearing last January, Mr. Homan acknowledged that he had no evidence to support the statement and flatly rejected the replacement theory, which has roots in white nationalism.
But speaking to to the Rods of Iron Ministries, a far-right Christian group, in October, he did not denounce the label.
“Call it what you want. There’s got to be a reason to unsecure the border,” Mr. Homan said.
In his interview with The Times, Mr. Homan said he didn’t think of the theory he espoused as the same as the racist trope. “It’s a future political benefit that may be awarded to one party,” Mr. Homan said. “To me it’s not a race issue.”
Mr. Homan also became a regular speaker on the election-denial circuit, and in 2023, became chief executive of the America Project, an organization co-founded by Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Patrick Byrne.
Mr. Homan spun off an immigration-focused project two months later but continued to speak at America Project events.
In the interview, Mr. Homan said he did not endorse any racist or antisemitic ideas and refused to say whether he believed the 2020 election was stolen. He left America Project because he wanted to focus solely on immigration issues, he said. “You will never find a statement I made that attacks any nationality or religion,” Mr. Homan said.
He opened a consulting business that has worked for companies seeking immigration-related contracts, including those poised to benefit from Mr. Trump’s policies. At one point he was paid between $100,000 and $150,000 to lobby in Texas for Fisher Industries, a construction firm that last year secured a $225 million contract with the state to build a section of border wall.
(Mr. Homan said he would stay out of discussions about specific contracts, focusing instead on policy, to avoid accusations of conflicts of interest. He said he was shutting down his consulting business.)
In preparing to return to government, Mr. Homan contributed to Project 2025, the policy blueprint so controversial during the campaign that Mr. Trump distanced himself from it.
And in speeches and interviews with right-wing influencers, he presented his vision for a new deportation campaign that repudiates the policies he once executed.
“We’re going to have the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen,” Mr. Homan told Benny Johnson, a right-wing commentator. “And I’m not going apologize for it.”
