Trump names former ICE official Tom Homan as border czar: NPR

President-elect Trump announced Sunday evening that Tom Homan, his former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), will join his second administration to oversee border enforcement.

In his role as “border czar” – which does not require Senate confirmation – Homan will be responsible for the southern and northern U.S. borders as well as “all maritime and air security,” Trump said in his post on Truth Social.

“Similarly, Tom Homan will be responsible for all deportations of illegal aliens to their country of origin,” Trump wrote, adding, “There is no one better able to monitor and control our borders.”

It is unclear what role Homan will take on, as managing immigration requires coordination among multiple Department of Homeland Security agencies.

Homan, a former police officer and border patrol agent, has worked under six presidents in his three decades as a law enforcement officer – and has repeatedly praised Trump for being the one who did the most to secure the border.

Sunday’s announcement was widely expected since Trump said over the summer that he would tap Homan to help oversee immigration policy in his potential second term. At the National Conservatism Conference in July, Homan urged undocumented immigrants to “wait until 2025,” adding, “If you’re here illegally, you better look over your shoulder.”

“Trump is coming back in January,” Homen said. “I’ll be on his heels when I get back. And I will carry out the largest deportation operation this country has ever seen.”

Homan was behind Trump’s controversial family separation policy

Homan was the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration during his tenure as acting director of ICE from January 2017 to June 2018.

During that time, he often appeared at White House press conferences to personally defend his agents’ arrests of undocumented immigrants and to call for stricter enforcement, according to CNN, and applauded Trump for “taking the shackles off” ICE “It allowed agents to have a broader reach.” Series of arrests.

Homan was notably one of the architects behind his controversial family separation policy. More than 5,500 immigrant children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 under the administration’s short-lived “zero tolerance” policy. According to the Department of Homeland Security, there were still 1,401 children without confirmed family reunification in April.

Trump signed an executive order stopping family separations in June 2018 after strong condemnation from lawmakers and the public, and the Biden administration formally repealed it days after he took office in 2021.

Homan retired in 2018 frustrated when the White House failed to move his nomination toward Senate confirmation Washington Post. He became a contributor to Fox News, joined the conservative Heritage Foundation as a visiting scholar and contributed to Project 2025, his controversial blueprint for overhauling the federal government.

During the election campaign, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even though it overlaps with his own agenda. Trump has made immigration a key part of his campaign, vowing to deport millions of immigrants who are in the country without authorization.

Homan warned undocumented immigrants to ‘start packing’

Homan spoke in an interview on Fox about how such deportations would work Sunday morning futures Hours before his appointment was announced, he said it was a “targeted, planned operation carried out … by the men of ICE.”

“When we go out there, we know who we’re looking for, we most likely know where they’re going to be, and it’s going to be done in a humane manner,” Homan said, adding that the focus will be on “threats to public safety and national security threats first.”

But those groups won’t be the only targets, Homan told CBS. 60 minutes last month. He said he would resume workplace enforcement after the Biden administration moved away from the controversial practice of mass searches of immigrants in the workplace and instead focused on prosecuting “exploitative employers.” In that interview, he also said that “families can be deported together” and suggested that children who are U.S. citizens but have undocumented parents would have to go with them.

Months earlier, Homan said on stage at the Republican National Convention that Trump would call Mexican cartels a “terrorist organization” for bringing fentanyl across the border and warned, “He will wipe you off the face of the earth.”

However, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the vast majority of fentanyl dealers are U.S. citizens.

He also addressed undocumented immigrants in general, whom he said Biden had allowed into the country in violation of federal law.

“You better start packing now,” he said, as those in attendance, waving pro-deportation signs, cheered. “Because you’re going home.”

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy proposals, while clearly a popular issue with voters, have not been met without pushback.

In the days since Trump’s election, immigrant rights groups have said they are prepared to challenge his anti-immigrant policies through protests, local laws and lawsuits. And analysts at the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute and the Niskanen Center predict that lower – perhaps even negative – net migration to the U.S. would hurt the country’s economy, as NPR reported.

Homan is not the only candidate Trump has named for his upcoming term. Last week he announced that Susie Wiles would be his chief of staff.

On Monday, Trump offered Rep. Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican and leader of the House Republican Conference, to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The role requires Senate confirmation, which is all but guaranteed in the soon-to-be Republican-controlled chamber.

Sergio Martínez-Beltrán contributed to this report.