When President Donald Trump introduced that border czar Tom Homan can be taking on immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, many anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement critics, conservatives, and media commentators sighed a breath of reduction.
As an alternative of the firebrand Greg Bovino, Minneapolis would get an grownup within the room ultimately: somebody who labored beneath Democratic and Republican presidents, who had extra expertise with enforcement operations, and who has been comparatively quiet as Trump’s mass deportations have unfolded this 12 months.
- Trump has tasked his “border czar” Tom Homan with dealing with immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, changing the Border Patrol official who oversaw the DHS surge to town that resulted within the killing of two residents.
- The transfer has been greeted by politicians and commentators as an indication {that a} extra severe, much less showboaty chief will now be in cost and can deescalate tensions within the metropolis.
- However Homan himself has a checkered previous — and it’s helpful to revisit that previous as he’s lauded.
Homan himself appeared to strike this distinction throughout his first information convention on Thursday after assembly with state and native leaders this week. “I didn’t come to Minnesota for picture ops or headlines,” he mentioned. “You haven’t seen me.”
Given how outrageous Bovino’s management was, how chaotic ICE and Customs and Border Safety’s operations in Minneapolis have been, and the way a lot dangerous press Trump and Bovino had been getting from their very own allies, one could possibly be forgiven for believing that anybody can be an enchancment.
Nonetheless, a better have a look at Homan’s report reveals a extra sophisticated — and doubtlessly disturbing — image.
His actions, his statements, and his prior controversies recommend that he’s one thing apart from the moderating “grownup within the room” that he has been introduced as by the Trump administration.
Is Homan a conciliator who can work with either side?
Homan’s cost was greeted warmly by Republican lawmakers.
“Tom is the knowledgeable’s knowledgeable and has devoted his life to implementing immigration legislation and coverage in each Democrat and Republican administrations,” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham remarked on-line after Trump’s announcement.
“There isn’t any one who understands deportations higher than Tom Homan,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) mentioned. And Senate Majority Chief John Thune (R-SD) known as Homan’s dispatch “a constructive growth — one which I hope results in turning down the temperature and restoring order in Minnesota.”
To some extent, these hosannas have some validity.
Homan has an extended historical past of working throughout the nation’s immigration and border equipment. Earlier than the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) company was established, he labored for its predecessor businesses. Nonetheless, it wasn’t till President Barack Obama’s first time period that he rose by the ranks and achieved some measure of nationwide prominence.
When left-wing critics described Obama because the “deporter-in-chief,” they had been actually referring to Homan, who served as ICE’s director of enforcement removing operations beginning in 2013.
That was a historic 12 months for deportations, because the Obama administration oversaw greater than 400,000 of them.
Equally, Homan was praised for the Division of Homeland Safety’s dealing with of a surge of unaccompanied minors and households, primarily from Central America, throughout Obama’s second time period. Homan was credited — and awarded — for all of this.
Obama “believed in border enforcement. He took steps to safe the border,” Homan informed the New York Occasions about that point. “So I did my job. I take it President Obama thought I did it fairly nicely, and he gave me an award.”
On January 13, 2016, Homan acquired the 2015 Presidential Rank Award, which ICE known as “the nation’s highest civil service award,” bestowed by the president to “high profession govt and senior professionals for persistently demonstrating energy, integrity and dedication to public service.”
After Trump first received in 2016, he requested Homan to function ICE’s performing director, the place he would go on to make headlines for saying that undocumented immigrants “must be afraid” and for promising a robust home enforcement program.
Critics described this as “fear-mongering” on the time. Requested in 2023 if he regretted his rhetoric, Homan doubled down. “I stand by that assertion,” he mentioned. “When you’re within the nation illegally, you shouldn’t be snug. Try to be involved since you broke our legal guidelines.”
Homan would additionally go on to play a key function within the household separation coverage that resulted in 2018’s “children in cages” information cycle — although he has argued that “it wasn’t about, ‘Let’s see how we will hurt these individuals.’ It [was] about doing what we may so individuals wouldn’t put themselves within the palms of felony cartels to get raped and get killed.”
“Now, hindsight being 20/20,” he conceded, “the [family] reunification course of may have been higher.”
That entire episode would end in greater than 5,500 youngsters being taken from their mother and father. It took years for lots of of those households to be reunited.
And the controversy resulted in Homan’s retirement.
Are Homan’s views much less radical than these of Greg Bovino or Stephen Miller?
In comparison with his friends in Trump 2.0, Homan has been much less of a visual determine than he was initially anticipated to be.
He returned to the White Home final 12 months, trumpeted as Trump’s “border czar” who would seal up the southern border with Mexico, limit authorized and unlawful immigration, and oversee the mass deportation program that Trump had promised through the 2024 marketing campaign.
He was charged with home operations — working in New York Metropolis and Chicago to step up arrests, detentions, and deportations in sanctuary cities — however gained probably the most consideration in 2025 for his confrontations with Democratic politicians like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over her help of ICE protests, “Know Your Rights” schooling drives, and his observe report throughout Trump 1.0.
He emerged as a type of Trump bulldog, showing on cable information, giving press conferences to criticize “sanctuary metropolis” insurance policies, and defending the administration’s deportation ways — together with when going through off in opposition to courts and senators for deportations to El Salvador in 2025.
It could even be a stretch to say that Homan’s rhetoric and tone have been measured.
At one level, again in 2019, for instance, he mirrored on talking earlier than a congressional listening to about his Trump 1.0 tenure, telling Fox Information that he “hesitated a minute earlier than I began yelling as a result of I truly thought of getting up and throwing that man a beating proper there in the midst of the room.”
“That man” was a US Congress member.
Final 12 months, he threatened native officers in Boston for not desirous to cooperate with immigration officers, saying, “I’m coming to Boston, and I’m bringing hell with me.”
At one other level, talking of Mexican cartels, he threatened navy motion, saying they “can be silly to tackle the navy” and would “count on violence to escalate…as a result of the cartels are making report quantities of cash…and [w]e’re taking cash out of their pocket.”
Nonetheless, he’s not been as excessive as Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino, or DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who’ve all taken a way more antagonistic strategy of their newer showdowns with Democratic politicians, activists, protesters, and immigrants themselves.
For one, he hasn’t explicitly accused anybody of “home terrorism” or of being “home terrorists” like Bovino, Miller, and Noem have. He did say, nevertheless, that if “you search for this definition of terrorism,” Renee Good’s actions “definitely may fall inside that definition.”
A part of this outcomes from reported distancing and feuding between Homan and Noem over fashion, contracts, and heated private rivalries.
Additionally, not like Miller, Bovino, and Noem, Homan has beforehand defended due course of and the courts system, saying: “Individuals have a proper to assert asylum. They’ve a proper to due course of. And you realize what? They do.”
Nonetheless throughout Trump 2.0, he has been important of “Know Your Rights” civic schooling initiatives. He’s known as them efforts to “defy ICE” and impede legislation enforcement: “They name it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I name it tips on how to escape arrest.”
That mentioned, Homan is not any Boy Scout. Homan has denied associations with white supremacist teams and far-right militias, just like the Proud Boys.
You additionally would possibly bear in mind a particular and lurid allegation about Homan — specifically, that in September 2024, he accepted $50,000 delivered in a paper bag from undercover brokers posing as contractors searching for authorities contracts through the 2024 election.
The White Home and Justice Division each got here to his protection when the story broke in 2025, saying it was an effort to “entrap” him.
Has Homan criticized ICE/CBP maximalism?
Extra not too long ago, Homan has been a bit extra important and cautious round enforcement operations, given the optics of him coming in to scrub up the mess created by his predecessor in Minneapolis.
He’s admitted errors previously, saying, “Nothing’s good, something may be improved on, and what we’ve been engaged on is making this operation safer, extra environment friendly, by the e-book.” He’s emphasised “focused” work in Minnesota repeatedly and claimed that DHS’s “mission goes to enhance due to the modifications we’re making internally.”
He hasn’t totally thrown Noem, Bovino, and Miller beneath the bus but, however he has instructed a reversal to how issues have been working, saying that his “essential focus now could be draw-down primarily based upon the nice conversations I’ve had together with your state and native leaders.”
This observe report demonstrates why nuance is required in any evaluation of Homan’s rise. However extra importantly, it’s an instance of a pattern within the Trump period: Controversial figures can typically find yourself being normalized due to the sheer quantity and diploma of extremity of the figures surrounding the president. Who’s Homan, if you’ve handled Bovino, Noem, and Miller?
