Donald Trump puts Tom Homan "in charge of all deportation"
President-elect Donald Trump has announced that Tom Homan, his former acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, will be in charge of the mass deportations that Trump pledged during his campaign.
"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")," he wrote on his Truth Social website late on Sunday.
Trump said Homan "will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin" in addition to overseeing the northern and southern borders and "all Maritime, and Aviation Security."
"I've known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders," Trump said "Congratulations to Tom. I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long awaited for, job."
Homan has been contacted for comment via his website.
Trump had said Homan, a contributor to Project 2025, would have a role in his administration if he won reelection in October.
Homan is one of dozens of former Trump administration officials who contributed to Project 2025, an almost 900-page document that detailed policy plans for the next Republican administration developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Though Trump repeatedly tried to distance himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, his own platform shares broad policy similarities with the document, including plans for mass deportations.
In an interview on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures, Homan defended Trump's plan for mass deportations and said that ICE would move to implement them 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 told host Maria Bartiromo.
"When we go out there, we're going to know who we're looking for. We'll most likely know where they're going to be, and it's going to be done in a humane manner...these people be well taken care of. It will be a humane operation, but it's necessary, mass deportation operation."
He also denied that the military would be involved in rounding up and arresting immigrants who are in the country illegally and that the focus would be on those who pose a threat to public safety and national security.
Homan also said that Trump's plan is "going to save the taxpayers money" in the long run.
The cost to arrest, detain, process and deport a million people a year would cost $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade, or about $88 billion annually, according to a recent report from the nonprofit advocacy group American Immigration Council. The report also says that mass deportations would disrupt major industries that are already facing shortages, such as construction and agriculture.
Asked about the cost of the plan, Trump told NBC News on Thursday: "It's not a question of a price tag... Really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they're going to go back to those countries because they're not staying here. There is no price tag."
Polling during the campaign showed majority support for mass deportations among voters, but exit polls on Election Day showed stronger support for pathways to legal status for undocumented migrants over deporting them, while immigration slipped down voters' priority lists.
Homan has spent more than three decades in immigration enforcement. A former New York police officer, he joined the United States Border Patrol in 1984. He worked as a border-patrol agent, investigator, supervisor and other roles before being named the executive associate director of ICE in 2013 during former President Barack Obama's administration.
Trump appointed Homan as acting director of ICE in January 2017, a position he held until his retirement in June 2018.
During that time, he oversaw the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy that results in thousands of families being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Atlantic called Homan the "intellectual father" of the policy in a report in 2022, saying that he was among the first to propose the idea of prosecuting undocumented migrants who cross the border illegally with their children and separating families.
The plan was rejected for being "heartless and impractical" during the Obama administration, the report said, but later adopted during Trump's first term.
In 2023, Homan said he was "sick and tired" of hearing about family separations. "I'm still being sued over that.... I don't give a s***, right? Bottom line is, we enforced the law," he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
At the National Conservatism Conference earlier this year, Homan said: "Trump comes back in January, I'll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen. They ain't seen s*** yet. Wait until 2025."
