Tom Homan

Tom Homan, Trump’s Acting Director of ICE, was considered the intellectual “father” of the Administration’s family separation policy, which forcibly separated more than 5,500 migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border as a deliberate migration deterrent measure. While Acting Director, he also led ‘workplace raids’ targeting undocumented workers and stated that elected officials in ‘sanctuary cities’ should be charged with crimes and arrested. He is a contributor to Project 2025 and was a speaker at the 2024 RNC Convention.

While at ICE, Homan was also responsible for leading ‘workplace raids’ in which ICE officials raided 7-Eleven stores across the country to show the “consequences of employing undocumented people.” This was both meant to scare employers away from hiring undocumented people as well as prevent undocumented people from showing up to work. As Homan said, “Not only are we going to prosecute the employers who knowingly hire the illegal aliens, we are going to detain and remove the illegal alien workers.”

During his tenure as ICE Director, Homan went so far as to say elected officials in ‘sanctuary cities’ should be charged with crimes and arrested. He said both that “the Department of Justice needs to file charges against municipalities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities and deny them funding” and “politicians should be held ‘personally accountable’ for crimes committed by people living in the U.S. illegally.”

After retiring from ICE, Homan became a Fox News contributor and joined the Heritage Foundation as a Visiting Fellow. He has been a contributor to Project 2025 which outlines extraordinarily harsh immigration policies such as the document’s mass deportation program. Homan, as recently as the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023, said “I’m sick and tired hearing about the family separation… You know, I’m still being sued over that, so come get me. I don’t give a shit, right. Bottom line is, we enforced the law.”

Trump has indicated that he would bring back Homan during his next administration, saying “I have Tom Homan lined up, we have the greatest people,” and “we’re bringing back Tom Homan” on two separate occasions.

Homan is eager to return to a position where he can crack down even more severely on migration, saying, “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen…They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

Since leaving the federal government, Homan has built up connections with an anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate group. A primary example of this is his work on the “Defend the Border and Save Lives” project with The United West, a group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim hate group.