Donald Trump has rehired the highly controversial immigration official Tom Homan, considered one of the key architects of the “zero tolerance” family separation policy during his first administration.
The immigration hardliner served as the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) between 2017 and 2018.
The president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform overnight that Homan would be in charge of “the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security.”
Homan will be involved in Trump’s stated goal of carrying out the “largest deportation operation in American history” through federal, state, and local law enforcement by invoking the same 1798 law used to carry out mass Japanese internment during the Second World War.
Under the separation initiative, immigration officials broke with the longstanding practice of keeping migrant families together and out of detention, instead sending parents to immigration court for removal proceedings and children to the care of a separate agency.
Immigration offenses are considered civil violations, not criminal ones, and many of the families first presented as asylum-seekers, but they were soon on the fast track out of the country.
The practice separated at least 5,000 families, many permanently, as parents were sent abroad and the Trump administration initially declined to keep track of where they ended up. As of this May, an estimated 1,400 families remained apart.
Trump has been eager to bring Homan, a Project 2025 contributor, back into the fold, telling a radio host during the campaign, “He’s coming on board.”
As Homan boasted during a conference in July, “They ain’t seen s*** yet...Wait until 2025.”
When asked in a recent ‘60 Minutes’ interview about whether that operation would entail returning to family separation, Homan suggested it “needs to be considered absolutely.”
"Their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally,” Homan explained. “So he created that crisis."
According to reporting from The Atlantic, Homan may have been the first government official to seriously propose intentional family separation back in 2014, though officials dismissed this at the time as “heartless and impractical,” given both the moral and logistical costs of separating children from their families.
The proposal later found a receptive ear in Trump, who launched his 2016 campaign demonizing Mexican migrants as drug dealers and rapists and made cracking down on immigration a signature issue.
Homan told The Atlantic he was inspired to propose the family separation idea after witnessing the aftermath of grisly trafficking and violence on the border.
“The goal wasn’t to traumatize,” he told the magazine. “The goal was to stop the madness, stop the death, stop the rape, stop the children dying, stop the cartels doing what they’re doing.”
Since then, he’s taken on a more belligerent tone.
“I’m sick and tired of hearing about the family separation,” Homan said at a conference last year. “I’m still being sued over that.”
“I don’t give a s***, right? Bottom line is, we enforced the law.”
Since retiring from the Trump administration, Homan has been a fixture on Fox News, where he describes immigration as an “invasion.” Border states like Texas have pushed to declare immigration an “invasion” to free up additional military-style powers to police the border, which experts have told The Independent is a view unfounded in the law.
Homan has also served in a group of border experts called Border911, which has traveled the country promoting the idea, which many argue is racist, that Democrats are intentionally encouraging illegal immigration to secure political power.
Border911 has backed initiatives like Prop 314 in Arizona, which passed this year, allowing state and local officials to act as immigration officials, normally the duty of the federal government.
The group, according to reporting from the Texas Observer, was previously part of the America Project, a group founded by pro-Trump election deniers Patrick Byrne, former CEO of Overstock.com, and Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced, QAnon-following former national security adviser.
People affiliated with the border group have private businesses that receive government contracts and provide consulting on immigration issues and could stand to gain from a new administration promoting hardline immigration policies.
The Biden administration indeed presided over record levels of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border in late 2023, but levels have since returned to less than half of their peak during the Trump administration.
