Trump’s Border Czar Is a Terrible Person
Tom Homan, bad human.
ON NOVEMBER 11, THE DAY AFTER President-elect Donald Trump anointed him “border czar” in the next administration, Tom Homan appeared on Fox News, where he has worked as a contributor, to offer up a peculiar assurance: “Frankly, I don’t care what people think about me.”
That’s good, because I think—and I know I am not alone in this—that Tom Homan is one of the worst people on earth. Even among the ideologues, extremists, and sycophants being pulled together as Trump’s 2.0 team, he stands out for his sheer ugliness, meanness, and pious phoniness.
As an architect and proponent of the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy toward immigrants, Homan is eager to embrace his new opportunities to inflict pain and suffering on the huddled masses who, unlike him, are a vital part of what makes America great. He will be working with Stephen Miller, the administration’s newly named deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, to pursue the promised mass deportation of more than eleven million undocumented U.S. residents—parents, caregivers, taxpayers, and valued employees.
A former New York City police officer and Border Patrol officer, Homan was tapped by President Barack Obama to head up the deportation branch of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and by Trump 45 to serve as the agency’s acting director. He performed these roles with relish, carrying out record numbers of deportations under Obama—numbers higher, even, than those under Trump, thus cementing Obama’s reputation as the nation’s deporter-in-chief. (Obama was so appreciative he gave Homan the nation’s highest civil service recognition, a Presidential Rank Award.)
But there was one portal of pure cruelty that the Obama administration would not let Homan pursue: the mass separation of children from their families as a means of dissuading desperate people from seeking protection in the United States. In 2014, a year after Homan had been brought on board, he proposed using family separation as an immigration deterrent to Jeh Johnson, Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security, who told the Atlantic he rejected the idea as “heartless and impractical.”
Trump, of course, had no such reservations. Under his watch, more than 4,000 children were separated from their parents, drawing massive backlash and as well as a visit to a migrant children’s shelter in Texas by First Lady Melania Trump, sporting a jacket that proclaimed, “I really don’t care, do u?”
In 2019, during a congressional hearing, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) got Homan to admit that he was the person who recommended a zero tolerance approach that included family separation. But being the slithery liar he was and probably always will be, Homan insisted it was no big whoop.
The policy, he contended, was “the same as it is when every U.S. citizen parent gets arrested when they are with a child.” When AOC reminded him that the policy consisted of separating children from their parents, Homan continued: “If I get arrested for DUI and I have a young child in a car, I will be separated. When I was a police officer in New York and I arrested a father for domestic violence, I separated that father from the family.”
That effort to rationalize and minimize his monstrous inhumanity goes hand-in-hand with Homan’s self-delusion that he is driven by a high sense of moral purpose.
IN HIS 2020 BOOK, Defend the Border and Save Lives: Solving Our Most Important Humanitarian and Security Crisis, Homan, now 63, recalled his boyhood in West Carthage, a village in upstate New York not far from the Canadian border. His father was a police officer, his mother a homemaker.
“Our upbringing was very conservative and very Catholic,” Homan wrote. “We went to Mass every Sunday and sat in the same pew every time. God help anyone who arrived before us and sat in our seats!”
A recent article by Matthew McDonald in the National Catholic Register says that while Homan does not speak often about his Catholicism, he continually “portrays securing the border and removing people who are here illegally in moral terms, describing these actions as a humanitarian imperative.” In Homan’s view, the fact that truly bad things happen to people seeking to enter the United States from other countries makes stopping the flow of immigrants a truly good thing to do. As McDonald explains it:
He argues that a porous border enables cartels in Mexico to brutalize migrants, subjecting them to sexual assault, inhumane traveling conditions, torture (when they or their relatives don’t pay up) and sometimes death, and that it penalizes U.S. citizens and legal immigrants by lowering the wages of laborers, particularly poor people, while promoting disrespect for the law and chaos in communities.
The idea is that migrants, after enduring the expense, hardship, and suffering of trying to gain admission to the United States, will be made whole by being rounded up, separated (perhaps forever) from their children, and put into mass detention centers to await return to the frequently nightmarish locales they were fleeing.
Not everyone agrees that family separation is the sort of policy Jesus Christ might endorse. Pope Francis has opposed it, as have prominent American Catholic leaders. A few days after Trump won re-election, three prominent U.S. Catholic bishops released a statement noting the essential role that immigrants play in American society; it called for “fair and generous pathways to full citizenship for immigrants,” as well as a “system that provides permanent relief for childhood arrivals, helps families stay together, and welcomes refugees.”
During an interview he gave in late November to the New York Post, Homan reportedly “broke down” while speaking about a two-year-old migrant girl who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border alone, holding a piece of paper with just a first name and number on it. That led to his reminiscing about the horrors he’d seen in his 34 years with the Border Patrol.
I’ve held dying children and I’ve helped dead children. I’ve talked to girls as young as nine who were raped multiple times by members of the cartel. I saw 19 dead aliens at my feet, a five-year-old boy was baked to death. I’m tired of it. We’ve got to tell the truth about the tragedy on that border, about the women being raped by members of the cartel, about children being sexually assaulted. A child dies almost every fucking day on that border.
But why traumatize the surviving children by removing them from their parents? Why does he consider this an okay thing to do? In his recent star turn on 60 Minutes, Homan was asked whether there was a way to avoid breaking up families that include both natural born and undocumented members. (More than four million U.S.-born children under 18 live with an undocumented immigrant parent or guardian.)
“Of course there is,” Homan replied. “Families can be deported together.”
IN LAUNCHING HIS FIRST SUCCESSFUL BID for the presidency, Trump shocked many with his nativist accusations regarding immigrants from Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Such talk is pretty weak tea compared with the rhetoric that Trump deployed to secure Win Number Two. Gone is any reference to the possibility of immigrants being good people. Instead, they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs, and engaging in unspeakable violence. They’ll “cut your throat and won’t even think about it the next morning,” Trump told a group of his followers in late September. “They grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents.”
It’s safe to say that Homan will offer no resistance to this tactic of just making shit up to justify cruelty to immigrants. In 2017, when he was acting director of ICE, Homan put out a press release suggesting that an immigrant named Jesus Fabian Gonzalez was to blame for a series of deadly wildfires that were raging at the time. This false claim spread like, well, wildfire, forcing Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano to take time off from fighting the fires and delivering relief to victims to publicly debunk these claims.
“There’s a story out there that he’s the arsonist for these fires,” Giordana stated at a press conference. “That is not the case. There is no indication he is related to these fires at all.” The sheriff also put out his own press release in which he said Homan’s claim was “inaccurate, inflammatory, and damages the relationship we have with our community.”
Homan is a contributor to “Project 2025,” a blueprint for Trump’s second term prepared by the Heritage Foundation, where he’s been a visiting fellow. The plan calls for the deportation on a mass scale through an expedited process. It would green-light raids in schools, hospitals, and religious institutions; allow the use of “military personnel and hardware” to prevent border crossings; expand the role of state and local police in enforcing federal immigration laws; curtail or eliminate popular visa categories; and repeal temporary protected status designations, among other things.
Homan can hardly wait to get started.
“We are going to have a historic deportation operation, because you’ve got a historic, illegal immigration crossing the southern border,” he said at a Heritage Policy Fest in July. And while these efforts would be focused on violent criminals and national security threats, Homan said, “No one’s off the table. 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.”
AMONG THE PLACES HOMAN WANTS people to be looking over their shoulders is at worksites, where he has affirmed that raids “have to happen.” The reason again relates to his self-image as a deeply caring and righteous person. “Where do we find most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking?” Homan asked his Fox News friends. “At worksites.”
This drew a rebuke from Heidi Altman, director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center, who pointed out that Homan is “conflating the traffickers with the people being trafficked” and “using public safety rhetoric to justify vicious tactics that tear families apart.”
Turns out we already know what workplace raids can accomplish, since this stratagem was deployed by ICE during the first Trump administration, albeit in a more limited way than what is now being contemplated. The results were horrific.
In August 2019, officials from ICE arrested hundreds of mostly Latino employees at a half-dozen Mississippi cities. An article at that time in the Jackson Free Press relates one such encounter, as described by the head of a state immigrant rights group: “In Canton, there was a young man who was working there that protested the arrests because he was an American citizen. And they tased him, knocked him to the ground, and put handcuffs on him before they finally figured out that he was an American citizen.”
This August, the paper reported that the reverberations from this onslaught were still being felt: “Many of the families that ICE broke up in 2019 remain separated half a decade later, some forced to reinvent themselves as single-parent households after the government deported their spouses.” The economies of these raided communities are still reeling.
A 2020 study by the Center for Law and Social Policy looked at the consequences of workplace raids in Ohio two years early, as well as those in Mississippi. It found: “The impact of raids on families, communities, and children—many of whom are U.S. citizens—was the complete devastation of family economic security and mental and physical wellbeing.”
“Immigrants were arrested in their neighborhoods, at work, and even during routine legal check-ins,” wrote Nikki Marín Baena, co-founder and co-director of a North Carolina immigrant rights group, in a recent op-ed for the Progressive magazine. “To stay under the radar, immigrants avoided any interaction with authorities, even in emergencies. Friends of mine who worked as painters, tutors, and in restaurants were arrested at random. These raids shattered communities and devastated businesses.”
Ruth Conniff, a Wisconsin journalist who wrote a book about the state dairy industry’s reliance on migrant workers, last week sized up the likely repercussions of Trump and Homan’s mass-deportation plans in a piece for the Madison paper Isthmus:
Immigrants comprise an estimated 70 percent of the workforce on Wisconsin dairy farms. Almost all of them are undocumented because Congress has not created a visa for year-round low-skilled farm work. The whole industry would go belly-up overnight without the immigrants who work around the clock milking cows and shoveling manure.
You think the price of eggs is high? Wait until you see what might soon happen to the price of milk.
But, as Conniff goes on to say, “the human toll is more appalling. In 2018, ICE staked out a Head Start center in Dane County [which includes Madison], waiting to grab parents as they arrived to pick up their preschoolers.” Some teachers rode the bus home with students “worried that their parents might not be there to meet them.”
But, happily, in Homan’s imagining, such horrific outcomes are easily avoided. Just deport entire families, U.S. citizen children as well as their parents. He considers it the right thing to do. And then Homan can rest easy in his church pew, after kicking out anyone already there, knowing in his heart that he is morally correct.
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