KEY PLAYER PROFILE

Thomas Homan

Border Czar to President Trump

Thomas Homan has won high praise from both President Obama and President Trump for his work at the highest levels of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

A longtime Border Patrol agent, investigator, and supervisor, Homan was appointed executive associate director of ICE in 2013. Three years later, Obama gave him a Presidential Rank Award. At the time, The Washington Post said, “Thomas Homan deports people. And he’s really good at it.”

Perhaps one of the only Obama appointees to rise in the first Trump administration, Homan ascended to acting commissioner of ICE in January 2017. In his first five months in the position, ICE reported 41,319 deportations — a 38 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. In a June 2017 interview he said, “If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by being in this country, you should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder. You need to be worried. No population is off the table.”

During his ICE tenure, Homan stuck to a strict interpretation of immigration laws, supporting a Trump administration policy that allowed ICE officers to treat pregnant detainees as they would any other. Previously, pregnant women had been spared from detention facilities. Under Homan’s leadership, ICE also escalated courthouse arrests of undocumented individuals, despite judges requesting otherwise and several court cases challenging the constitutionality of such actions. Homan also stepped up raids in sanctuary cities, a move that at least one judge saw as retaliation for said cities’ liberal policies.

A longtime critic of sanctuary cities, Homan suggested in February 2018 that politicians who support sanctuary cities should face criminal charges. “We gotta take [sanctuary cities] to court,” he said in a televised interview, “and we gotta start charging some of these politicians with crimes.” In December of 2024, as the incoming Border Czar, Homan told NewsNation that the Trump administration planned to follow through on that threat. “Sanctuary cities aren’t going to stop what we’re going to do,” Homan said. “They cannot knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal from ICE. Those are crimes.”

SOURCES:

Homan’S IDEAS

  • Border Security

    As a career border security official, Homan supports all increased funding and resources for enhancing the border as a security zone.

  • Border Wall

    Homan supports additional construction of barriers at the border and use of emergency declaration to access funding. In an interview in January 2025, Homan stated, “Walls work. Every place a border barrier’s been put up illegal immigration declined, illegal drug flow declined, and equally important, walls save lives. Women and children can’t get over the wall, which means they’re going to a place where there’s not a wall. And what’s waiting on them? The men and women of the Border Patrol that’s gonna take care of those humanitarian needs.”

  • Detention

    Homan has advocated for revising the Flores Agreement to permit the detention of families with small children for more than 20 days. In December 2024 he said the incoming Trump administration would bring back family detention. Regarding Trump’s mass deportation plan, Homan said, “Congress is going to have to give a massive amount of detention beds.”

  • Immigration Courts

    Homan supports additional funding and resources to speed up due process and the backlog of cases.

  • Undocumented Population

    Homan advocates for systematically deporting as much of the undocumented population as possible, supporting raids at courthouses, at workplaces, and in routine immigration check-ins for undocumented individuals who are in the process of authorizing or trying to change their status.

  • ICE

    Homan supports growing the agency and increasing its capacity to deport undocumented individuals in the country. He has also suggested that local officials in so-called sanctuary cities be prosecuted should they impede ICE raids or arrests.

  • DACA

    As acting director of ICE, Homan refused to give a guarantee to DACA enrollees that they would not be deported. “If we encounter them during a targeted enforcement operation,” he said during a 2018 interview, “we will take action.” He opposed a “clean” DACA bill that would give a pathway to citizenship for enrollees, saying that if it passed it would be a “shame.”

  • Asylum

    Homan advocates for raising the threshold for “credible fear” interviews to allow fewer claims to be accepted.

  • Central America Policy

    No statement found.

  • Visas

    Homan advocates for overhauling the E-Verify system and mandating it for all employers.

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