Agents of Mass Deportation: Who is Border Czar Thomas Homan?

Nov 13, 2024

Donald Trump has announced that Thomas Homan, a Project 2025 contributor and former acting ICE director under his first administration, will be returning to his second term as a “border czar” to carry out the ”bloody” mass deportation agenda that was the signature promise of his 2024 presidential campaign and seeks to send the military into our neighborhoods to round up millions of long-settled undocumented immigrants and likely some U.S. citizens.

“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote at his social media site, posting the announcement in the middle of the night. “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.”

Likely, Homan’s intentionally unrestrained extra-agency position will give the anti-immigrant zealot hitherto unseen ability to pursue the ethnic purges of mass deportation that he has long championed.

TOP THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT HOMAN

Homan has defended deporting U.S. citizens and the use of the U.S. military for his mass deportation agenda, saying, “no one is off the table.” We should believe him.
Homan was the ‘intellectual father’ of family separations that saw more than 5,000 children ripped away from their parents during Trump’s first administration.
Homan is an idealogue who is unlikely to be swayed by public pressure, meaning he is likely to overreach, especially as his deportation force inevitably begins to disrupt the lives of the whole country, including the MAGA base.
Homan has been a leading promoter of the white nationalist replacement theory, echoing the language of domestic terrorists who say our country is being “invaded” by a hostile force, known to the rest of us as immigrants. Homan also has a long history of rubbing shoulders with white nationalists and hate groups.

HOMAN WILL CARRY OUT UNSPARING MASS DEPORTATIONS

It was no secret that Homan would return in a potential second Trump administration, last year telling The New York Times that he’d met with Trump in 2022 and had “agreed to come back” to “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.” Homan continued to reiterate this violent vision throughout 2024 and in addition promised they would be unsparing, telling Time magazine in April that “No one should be off the table.” During a gathering of paleoconservatives several months later, Homan stated that if Trump returns in January, “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen … They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

Homan’s participation in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan adds credence to his fervent support for the mass deportation agenda, with the nearly-1,000 page document containing a disturbing provision that, despite its two-sentence brevity, will have devastating consequences by allowing the red state deportation army sought by Stephen Miller, who is also joining the new administration as Trump’s deputy chief of staff, to raid the most personal and sacred of spaces, notably schools, hospitals, and houses of worship. Homan also ignored the U.S. Constitution by joining in on Trump’s attacks on so-called sanctuary cities, defending attempts to defund localities that have implemented these sorts of policies and urging the prosecution of local officials.

Following news of his appointment to a second Trump term, Homan doubled-down on his attacks on states that are taking steps to protect their immigrant communities. “Well, a suggestion: If you are not going to help us, get the hell out of the way ’cause we’re gonna do it,” he said. “So, if we can’t get assistance in New York City, we may have to double the agents we send in New York City. We are going to do the job. Sanctuary cities are sanctuaries for criminals.” And despite continued claims by Trump allies about targeting supposed criminals, the Trump team is simultaneously pledging to get rid of enforcement priorities that make such targeting possible, leaving all undocumented communities vulnerable, even if they have no criminal record and have lived here for years.

HOMAN WAS CALLED THE ‘INTELLECTUAL FATHER’ OF THE FAMILY SEPARATION POLICY THAT TRUMP HAS NOT RULED OUT REINSTATING

Homan was such an early advocate of family separation at the southern border that he has been called the “intellectual father” of the policy by The Atlantic. Homan first pushed that children be ripped from their parents as a deterrent during the Obama administration, pitching the idea of prosecuting and separating families to then-Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. Homan acknowledged the separated families would suffer but essentially said it could always be worse. “Yes, the separated families would suffer, he acknowledged, but at least ‘they’re not dead,’” the report said.

Johnson would eventually shoot down the idea, stating that, “as a father, he couldn’t stomach separating children from their parents.” But Trump administration officials could stomach the idea, piloting the policy beginning in 2017 and ultimately resulting in the separation of 5,500 wailing and traumatized children, including nursing infants and toddlers, from their parents and guardians. Some parents said their children were separated from them “under the guise of being given baths” and “weren’t told where their sons and daughters were or when they would see them again,” The Washington Post reported in 2019. “Others were held in chain-link holding pens. Some were babies. Many were lost in the system.”

More than six years after a federal judge ordered Trump and his administration to begin the reunification of these children, many remain deeply traumatized and fearful that a second Trump term will resurrect this human rights disaster from coast to coast. Homan has shown a complete lack of empathy or remorse for his actions during his tenure in the first Trump administration, stating at CPAC in 2023 that he was “sick and tired hearing about the family separation.” Homan also opined about the legal ramifications of his actions, stating that “You know, I’m still being sued over that, so come get me. I don’t give a shit, right. Bottom line is, we enforced the law.”

EXTREME FIGURES TIED TO HOMAN WILL NOW HAVE UNFETTERED WHITE HOUSE ACCESS

During the Trump administration but in particular after, Homan built connections to extreme groups linked to white supremacy and has been a vocal messenger of deadly conspiracy theories, including ties to anti-immigrant hate groups, such as his participation in a number of events hosted by Tanton network hate groups Center for Immigration Studies and Federation for American Immigration Reform, and using a Fox News contributor role to profusely spreading the dangerous and violence-inducing white nationalist narrative of a migrant “invasion” at the border.

During one such media appearance in 2021, Homan proclaimed that the Biden administration “intentionally unsecured the most secure border” because “they truly believe in their hearts that these are future Democratic voters, they don’t even have to vote. All they have to do is be counted in the next census…[which] will lead to perpetual power in Congress.” This idea that more immigration is part of a secret plot to change the makeup of the United States and deliver Democratic power is an allusion to the white nationalist great replacement conspiracy theory. Then in April of this year, Homan’s Border911 organization – which ABC News reported has “extensive ties to prominent conspiracy theorists who pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election” – held an event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, which also further damned Trump’s bogus claim that he knew nothing about Project 2025.

Border911 has been endorsed by several high-level Republicans, including House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green, who has been at the forefront of pushing and promoting the dangerous replacement theory. The event reunited “the architects of Trump’s ugly family separation policy and include others who will undoubtedly carry out his plans to go even further in 2025, including rounding up and deporting Dreamers and hard-working immigrants in the U.S,” said Beatriz Lopez, Deputy Director of the Immigration Hub. “And this time around, they are prepared to skirt any accountability.”

Following articles reporting on some of his own shocking words threatening millions of families across the U.S., Homan has tried a bit of a backtrack on his extreme statements targeting undocumented communities. But those are largely about providing supporters and those looking for plausible deniability that Homan’s horrific and bigoted politics are not nearly as bad as they are.

“People say, Trump’s threatening this historic deportation operations. He’s going to build concentration camps. He’s going to sweep neighborhoods,” Homan stated at a Heritage Foundation event at the Republican National Convention. “Let me be clear. None of that will happen.” But Homan undercut his own claim just moments later, stating that millions of undocumented families with deep roots in this nation actually are at risk. “No one’s off the table,” Homan said. “If you’re in the country illegally, it’s not OK. If you’re in the country illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”

FURTHER RESOURCES ON THOMAS HOMAN

Combating Nativist Narratives

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