US election: New border tsar Tom Homan championed family separation policy in first term

Tom Homan is a key figure from Donald Trump’s first term who championed controversial policies such as family separation and contributed to Project 2025.

Tom Homan will become America’s new border tsar under Donald Trump. Picture: AFP.

Donald Trump has chosen a pugnacious anti-illegal immigration hardliner, Tom Homan, to oversee the president-elect’s proposed mass deportation campaign, tapping a key figure from his first term who makes no apologies for some of its most controversial policies, including the separation of migrant parents from their children.

Homan, who served as the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2017 to 2018, will take on the role of “border tsar,” Trump announced late Sunday night. Trump’s aides said Homan will have sweeping oversight of the immigration policies that animated voters and helped propel Trump back to the White House. His role wouldn’t require Senate confirmation.

“The advantage he’s gonna have is, there’s no question that Tom Homan will bring the implied authority of the president,” said Ron Vitiello, who succeeded Homan as acting ICE director under Trump. “No one’s gonna wonder.” Stephen Miller, the architect of many of Trump’s immigration policies, will take a broader role in the White House, though immigration and the deportation effort will continue to be a major focus for him. He is expected to serve as deputy chief of staff focused on policy, according to people familiar with the matter. CNN earlier reported Miller’s role. Miller didn’t respond to a request for comment. Trump on Monday also announced Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) for the role of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Taken together, the Homan, Miller and Stefanik selections showcase Trump rewarding loyalists as he begins to fill out his second administration.

As the acting ICE director, Homan scrapped an Obama administration policy – later re-adopted by the Biden administration – that directed officers to focus on arresting immigrants in the country illegally with serious criminal histories. Under his watch, ICE ramped up its raids on meat packing plants and other places where Spanish-speaking immigrants were known to gather.

A former police officer, Homan joined what was then called the Immigration and Naturalisation Service in the 1980s, and he spent decades working as a career government employee in various roles, including as a border patrol agent.

Homan first championed the idea of separating migrant families as a deterrent measure during the Obama administration, when in 2014 a surge of families from Central America started crossing the border illegally. The idea was rejected out of hand, but Homan revived it when Trump became president, and a pilot program started in 2017 before it was expanded border-wide.

Though Homan’s agency didn’t play a direct role in separating families, he was one of the policy’s most fervent advocates, both in public and in private, according to people who worked with him. Homan didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Homan, in a Monday morning interview with Fox News, said that he plans to once more issue guidance making all immigrants in the country illegally targets for arrest, and once again increase workplace raids.

Tom Homan is an anti-illegal immigration hardliner. Picture: AFP.

He also issued a warning to blue-state governors who have pledged not to co-operate with the incoming Trump administration: “If you’re not going to help us, get the hell out of the way [because] we’re going to do it,” he said. “So, if we can’t get assistance from New York City … we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City because we’re going to do the job.” Homan joined the Heritage Foundation as a fellow in 2022. He is listed as a contributor to a 900-page policy blueprint assembled by Heritage’s Project 2025. Trump and his allies distanced themselves from the group after it came under criticism from Democrats during the presidential campaign.

In the years since he left the Trump administration, Homan has been a fierce defender of Trump’s immigration policies in television interviews and speeches. Trump, an avid watcher of cable news, has been impressed by his public appearances, his advisers said.

“I’ve got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden has released into our country,” Homan said during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee over the summer. “You better start packing now.” Last year, in remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, Homan dismissed outrage from Democrats and human rights groups about Trump’s policy of prosecuting migrants who crossed the border illegally with their children, diverting the adults to jail and leaving their children effectively orphaned in the U.S. immigration system.

“I wake up everyday pissed off because this administration destroyed the most secure border in our lifetime and I’m sick and tired of hearing about the family separation,” he said.

“You know, I’m still being sued over that, so come get me, I don’t give a s – t.”

He added, “The bottom line is, we enforced the law. If I was a cop in New York and I arrest a father for domestic violence or someone for DUI, I separate that family. When you violate the law with a child, you’re going to be separated.”

Homan, 62, has called Trump “the greatest president in my lifetime” and advocated for the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, President Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, calling the Biden administration’s approach to immigration “borderline treasonous.” He has labelled the influx of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden administration the “biggest national security failure I’ve seen since 9/11.” He says he’s not anti-immigrant and supports legal immigration.

In an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” earlier this year, Homan argued that mass deportation “must be done,” pointing to what he called an illegal immigration crisis. He said Trump wouldn’t conduct mass sweeps of neighbourhoods and wouldn’t set up concentration camps to house detained migrants. But he said he expected to increase raids of workplaces around the country in search of people living in the country illegally.

Asked if there is a way to conduct mass deportation without separating families, Homan said, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.” Human rights groups and immigration advocates have raised concerns that large-scale deportations would force parents who are living in the country illegally to make difficult decisions about whether to leave their U.S. citizen children in America or bring them to their potentially dangerous home countries.

Homan said the revival of the family separation policy in a second Trump term “needs to be considered.” Trump’s family-separations policy was only in effect border wide for a few months before the former president was forced to end it, facing global condemnation and backlash even from some in his own party. In that time, there was also little evidence it had the intended deterrent effect: though several thousand families were separated in the span of about two months, the numbers of migrants crossing the border illegally didn’t drop.

Dow Jones