In February 2022, Tom Homan went to the Orlando World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, and took a seat among a group of young white supremacists. Homan — who oversaw former President Donald Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant regime as acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and who under former President Barack Obama was responsible for record-high levels of deportations as the head of ICE’s deportation branch — had been invited to speak at the American First Political Action Conference.
As HuffPost first reported at the time, Homan claimed he was unaware of what the AFPAC was all about — his assistant had booked him at the event, he said, and had likely confused America First, the event’s organizer, with another right-wing group. Sitting at the table, waiting for the event to begin, Homan got out his phone and looked up Nick Fuentes, the leader of America First, and came across a bunch of articles labeling him a “white nationalist.” This didn’t prompt Homan to get up and leave. He was skeptical of the label “white nationalist.” After all, he knew what it was like to be unfairly labeled a bigot and a racist during his time overseeing ICE. Maybe Fuentes had suffered the same injustice. But then he read that Fuentes had praised Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Homan got up from the table, leaving the conference before it began.
At the AFPAC, after Homan left, Fuentes praised Adolf Hitler, while other speakers cheered on Putin’s bombing of Ukraine and called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be hanged. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) gave a speech in which she told the assembled white supremacists they had a “responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand for our freedoms, and stop the Democrats, who are the communist party of the United States of America.”
Asked if it inspired any self-reflection that someone like Fuentes — a young, wildly racist and antisemitic leader of the America First “groyper” movement who attended the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — would want him to speak at the AFPAC, Homan demurred. He told HuffPost in a phone interview after the AFPAC that he didn’t know why Fuentes might like him. He had never even met the guy.
A few minutes later, Homan called HuffPost back to make a clarification: “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” he said of Fuentes and the groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know.”
This weekend, Trump announced that Homan would serve as his “border czar.”
“I am pleased to announce that the Former ICE Director, and stalwart on Border Control, Tom Homan, will be joining the Trump Administration, in charge of our Nation’s Borders (‘The Border Czar’), including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social.
“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,” Trump added.
Homan didn’t immediately return HuffPost’s request for comment about the appointment.
Tapping Homan for this role signals that Trump is aiming to fulfill his horrifying campaign promise to mass deport millions of immigrants in the U.S. Trump campaigned on fascist rhetoric, arguing that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and portraying them as inherently criminal or savage — like when he pushed the lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets.
Homan was a significant contributor to Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump administration put together by several conservative groups and other key allies. Announcing Homan as part of his upcoming administration signifies that Trump, despite distancing himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, is actually poised to implement many of its policies.
Homan has essentially been auditioning to be Trump’s “border czar” all year.
“Trump comes back in January,” he said during a speech this summer at the National Conservatism conference. “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.”
“We are going to have a historic deportation operation, because you’ve got a historic, illegal immigration, crossing the southern border,” Homan said, later adding: “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. … The bottom line is: Every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It’s a crime to enter this country illegally.”
Homan notoriously spearheaded one of the most brutal anti-immigration campaigns during Trump’s first term: a “zero tolerance” policy toward migrants, which meant separating thousands of migrant children from their parents. This cruel act, meant to deter more migrants from arriving at the southern border, resulted in thousands of children being put in shelters, living inside cages. There are an estimated 4 million children, all American citizens, who live with an undocumented parent or guardian.
Democracy In The Balance
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Last month, weeks before Trump earned a decisive electoral victory over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, Homan sat down with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” promising to round up immigrants at their workplaces if Trump brought him into his second administration.
Asked if there was a way to carry out mass deportations without separating people from their families, Homan said, “Of course there is,” adding bluntly, “Families can be deported together.”
