After making immigration a central issue in this year's presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump announced that Tom Homan will join his administration as the incoming "border czar."
Trump wrote late Sunday in a post on Truth Social that Homan would be in charge of the nation's borders, "including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security."
"I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders," Trump wrote.
Homan is returning to a top border security role within the Trump White House after serving as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first 18 months of Trump's first term. Prior to his tenure in the Trump administration, he was in the Obama administration as the ICE enforcement and removal operations executive associate director. In 2015, Obama gave Homan the Presidential Rank Award.
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Homan is joining a Trump administration that has vowed to carry out mass deportations, which Trump has said would be in the millions.
When Trump was in office, ICE was criticized by Democrats for a policy separating migrant parents from their children. It was a policy defended by Homan. Homan told PBS in 2018 that keeping families together during arrests was a logistical issue.
“A child can’t go to U.S. Marshals’ custody with the parents being charged with the crime of entering the country illegally,” he told PBS.
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Under a Trump presidency, Homan said that some U.S. citizens could be among those deported. He suggested in an interview with CBS News that children born in the U.S. to migrants in the nation illegally could be subject to deportation.
"Their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally. So he created that crisis," he said.
Homan also has widely criticized cities and states for being so-called "sanctuaries" for migrants in the U.S. illegally. In 2018, he suggested that California lose funding after the state approved a bill that prevented law enforcement from inquiring about a person's legal status and arresting people whose only alleged crime was immigration-related.
Homan said in a Fox News interview the policy put "politics over public safety."
While 2017 saw a dip in U.S. southwest border apprehensions, apprehensions increased in 2018 and hit a record in 2019.
After COVID-19 caused a major disruption to border crossings in 2020, apprehensions surged to unprecedented levels in 2021-23 before easing in 2024, according to ICE data.
