5 things to know about Tom Homan, Trump's new border czar

President-elect Trump has announced Tom Homan as his new administration’s border czar, putting a 30-plus-year immigration enforcement veteran at the head of his mass deportation pledge.

Homan, the second Trump appointee announced after White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, ran Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in an acting capacity in 2017 and 2018 before announcing his retirement.

Here are five things to know about him:

This is his second time coming out of retirement for Trump

Homan led ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) component from 2013 onward under former President Obama, and had planned to retire from public service to a consulting job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in 2017.

But on the way out of his retirement party, Homan received a call from then-White House chief of staff John Kelly offering him the top job at ICE.

He has since been a vocal cheerleader for the incoming president, joking with reporters in 2017 that Trump, “like him or love him, is doing the right thing.”

With Trump’s announcement Sunday, Homan left his job at Fox News as a contributor and will become one of Trump 2.0’s chief immigration architects along with hardliner Stephen Miller, who will occupy a White House position as a deputy to Wiles.

Though Trump sent a nomination to the Senate for Homan to formally lead ICE in 2018, Homan called it quits rather than face a potentially bruising Senate process.

He’s a 30-plus year veteran of immigration enforcement

Homan kicked off his law enforcement career as a police officer in West Carthage, N.Y., his hometown, before moving on to the Border Patrol, the defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service and then ICE, rising through the ranks.

His tenure at the top of ICE was seen as a boon for the agency’s chronic employee morale problem.

Homan’s demeanor as a cop’s cop helped him impress his bosses, too; in 2017, Trump praised Homan in a speech as someone who “looks very nasty, he looks very mean.”

“That’s what I’m looking for,” Trump said.

But Homan had a reputation as a moderate in the Obama administration, drawing criticism from some hardliners early in the first Trump administration.

Homan, however, became the face of the Trump administration’s most hawkish immigration policies.

He was an early proponent of family separations

He reportedly proposed family separations as an immigration deterrent even before Trump became president.

A veteran of Operation Streamline from his days along the border, Homan had seen first-hand the effects of criminalizing unauthorized border crossings.

Operation Streamline was a joint Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security initiative that sought to bring criminal charges against people caught crossing the border in an attempt to raise the stakes for first-time crossers.

According to The Atlantic, in 2014, Homan proposed family separations as a deterrent to Obama Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who shot the idea down as “heartless and impractical.”

But Homan’s idea gained traction in 2017 under Trump, leading to the separation of more than 4,000 children from their parents.

In 2018, Homan skirted questions about whether the policy was humane, telling CNN he enforced it because “I think it's the law and I'm in law enforcement and I must follow the law.”

He did not respond Monday to a request for comment by The Hill.

He’s a Project 2025 co-author

Homan is listed as a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” a blueprint of that organization’s vision of a conservative government.

Since 2022, Homan has been a visiting fellow at Heritage.

He’s also developed close ties with immigration restrictionist groups such as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), an organization that helped staff the top echelons of ICE when Homan was in charge.

Homan’s tenure as an advocate for tighter immigration enforcement has drawn accolades from the right and recrimination from the left.

In 2019, he faced off against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in a congressional hearing on the zero tolerance program, where he admitted to recommending the policy to former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, but denied that family separations were the end goal.

Homan’s encounter with Ocasio-Cortez was far from the first time he upset progressives or members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC).

In 2017, he angered immigrant advocates by putting together his ICE office with top appointments for operatives from groups like CIS and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

The relationship had been soured months before, when Homan canceled a meeting with Democrats, including CHC and immigration policy leaders, following a series of ICE raids ordered to capture “dangerous criminal aliens.”

Those raids rounded up hundreds of undocumented immigrants who immigrant rights groups said were otherwise law-abiding, setting off the confrontation.

Homan on Monday pledged to conduct workplace raids in a second Trump administration.

He will embrace the title ‘border czar’

Though “border czar” is not an official government title, Homan is expected to oversee day-to-day operations and strategy on both border security enforcement and interior enforcement.

Unlike Vice President Harris, who was given the same title by Republicans but not the White House, Homan will seek to highlight his border czar role and use it to rally the immigration enforcement troops.

Harris was never appointed as border czar, an informal position held in the Clinton and Obama administrations by Alan Bersin and early in the Biden administration by former Ambassador to Mexico Roberta Jacobson.

In 2019, Trump announced Homan would be his border czar, a decision that apparently caught Homan by surprise, but that assignment was overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Harris was attacked by Republicans as a failed border czar, though she denied having that role, instead acting as a bridge between the Biden White House and Central American countries that are both a source of origin and transit for migrants on their way to the United States.

Harris largely avoided visiting the border, opening another line of attack from Republicans.

Homan, conversely, is likely to visit the border early and often, and to focus his czar role inwardly, rather than internationally.

His role in directing workplace raids, potential family separations and deportations of immediate family members of U.S. citizens — an issue he’s said would be solved by deporting entire families — will make him a target of immigrant advocacy critics.

“Frankly, I don’t care what people think about me, especially in the left,” Homan told “Fox & Friends” on Monday.