By Jill Colvin and Rebecca Santana
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump says Tom Homan, his former acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, will serve as “border czar” in his incoming administration, a position that is likely to play a key role in Trump’s campaign pledges to secure the U.S.-Mexico border and mount a massive deportation operation.
“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,” he wrote late Sunday on his Truth Social site.
In addition to overseeing the southern and northern borders and “maritime, and aviation security,” Trump said Homan “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”
He says he had “no doubt” Homan “will do a fantastic, and long awaited for, job.”
Homan is a former Border Patrol agent who worked his way up to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017 and 2018 as the acting director.
At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington earlier this year, Homan said that while he thinks the government needed to prioritize national security threats, “no one’s off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
He also said: “You’ve got my word. Trump comes back in January, I’ll be in his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”
He said in recent interviews that those targeted — at least initially — would be people posing a risk to public safety and pushed back on suggestions that the U.S. military would be assisting in finding and deporting immigrants.
“You concentrate on the public safety threats and the national security threats first, because they’re the worst of the worst,” he said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” He also said ICE would move to implement Trump’s plans in a “humane manner.”
“It’s going to be a well-targeted, planned operation conducted by the men of ICE. The men and women of ICE do this daily. They’re good at it,” he said.
During a “60 Minutes” interview before the election, Homan called suggestions of mass neighborhood raids or building camps to hold people “ridiculous.”
When asked whether there was a way to carry out deportations without separating families, he said, “Families can be deported together.” He also said worksite immigration enforcement operations — which the Biden administration largely stopped — would be ”necessary.”
Homan started his career in 1984 as a Border Patrol agent before moving to ICE. He was an influential figure on immigration enforcement in the Obama administration, heading ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations arm — tasked with tracking down people who don’t have the right to be in the country and removing them.
When Homan retired as acting head of ICE, he said he wanted to spend more time with family. In an interview with the AP in 2018, he said he had not intended to stay on into the Trump administration but did after then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly asked him to stay. Homan said he was at his own retirement party when he got the request. Kelly gave him a weekend to decide, and he accepted.
After Homan stepped down, it appeared that he might be returning when Trump said in 2019 he wanted to bring Homan back as a “border czar.”
Homan said the announcement was premature. The reason he gave at the time may give some insight into how he believes the “border czar” position needs to operate this time around.
“I think any sort of border czar needs to be a person who coordinates an all-government response to the border,” adding, “That wasn’t the way it was set up,” he told Fox News at the time.
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Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writers Adriana Gomez Licon in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.