Tom Homan, unleashed

IN 2003ICEICEICEICEICEICE Tom Homan was in Dallas talking about a new agency he was helping to set up. It would eventually be known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (), part of the brand new Department of Homeland Security. But he was called away abruptly because of an emergency. In south Texas 19 migrants were found dead in the back of a lorry. They had suffocated on the drive across America’s southern border. Among them was a little boy. “This experience made Tom Homan who he is today,” Mr Homan wrote in his memoir published in 2020. “Don’t let anyone tell you that illegal immigration is a victimless crime.”The book, “Defend the Border and Save Lives”, reads like a list of grievances combined with a love letter to law enforcement. But it may be required reading for those hoping to understand President Donald Trump’s immigration policy. Mr Homan is the president’s “border tsar”, a nebulous position without a clear policy remit that, crucially, does not require Senate confirmation. Along with Stephen Miller, Mr Trump’s deputy chief of staff and an anti-immigrant hawk, he will advise the president on immigration enforcement at the border and help carry out “mass deportations”.Those who know of Mr Homan may have caught one of his appearances on Fox News, or heard him on right-wing podcasts ginning up support for the expulsion of millions of immigrants. Yet Mr Homan worked for Democrats, too, during his decades in federal law enforcement. His former co-workers have taken to wondering out loud whether Mr Trump’s ascendancy finally allowed him to say what he always felt, or if he adopted more extreme opinionssomewhere along the way.Long before he became the border tsar, Mr Homan was a police officer in his hometown of West Carthage, New York, near the Canadian border. He was born into a law-enforcement family: his father was a cop, and his father before him. In his book, Mr Homan writes about the influence of his grandfather. “I still have his police whistle and well-worn paperback notebook, which was given to me when I followed in his footsteps.” He joined the Border Patrol in 1984 and never looked back. More than three decades later, when he became the acting director of during Mr Trump’s first term, he was the agency’s first boss to come up from within the ranks.It was no secret that Mr Homan believed America needed to crack down at the southern border. Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama’s secretary for homeland security, remembers Mr Homan suggesting in 2014, when he led enforcement and removal operations at , that separating parents from their children would help deter illegal crossings. “I remember saying, ‘No, we’re not doing that’,” he recalls. “By then I’d been to the border enough times to have a visual of what it would look like to have a border patrol agent snatch a child out of a mother’s arms.” Yet he argues that Mr Homan was a respected adviser, albeit a conservative one. “He was a trusted voice,” says Mr Johnson. But “I knew the label on the bottle of wine I was getting without a doubt.”Even though removals were historically high during the Obama administration—so much so that the Democratic president was known as the “deporter-in-chief”—Mr Homan became disenchanted with the work. Former Obama officials recall agents being frustrated that the migrants they worked hard to arrest weren’t being deported. More than anything else, Mr Homan is known for being responsible to his agents, and he shared their frustrations. He often describes agents as being “handcuffed” by policies that restricted them. “I think he cared deeply about the workforce,” says John Sandweg, who briefly led during Mr Obama’s tenure. “He cared deeply about…doing whatever he could to make their lives and their professional lives better.”Unable to stomach the thought of working for Hillary Clinton, who was the front-runner during the 2016 presidential campaign, he chose to retire. Then in early 2017 John Kelly, then Mr Trump’s secretary of homeland security, called Mr Homan during his retirement party to ask if he would lead for Mr Trump. This time he found a president and a colleague, in Mr Miller, keen to implement the family-separation policy, officially known as “zero tolerance”. Nearly 4,700 children were removed from their parents, and at last count 1,360 were yet to be reunited with their families. A national outcry forced Mr Trump to swiftly shut it down. But Mr Homan continued to defend the policy, arguing that its deterrent effect was in the best interests of migrants themselves who were considering the dangerous crossing. “Zero tolerance is about more than just enforcing our laws, protecting our sovereignty, and securing our border,” he writes. “It is about saving lives.”If you look closely there are still glimpses of moderation. He consistently talks about deporting “the worst first”, by targeting national-security threats and criminals. That is hard to argue with. But then he adds that “no one is off the table.” He has no qualms with his boss’s most extreme policies, such as ending birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the constitution, and has threatened to jail local officials who resist mass deportations. In short, he is a loyal soldier in an administration full of them. “They all talk the talk,” Mr Homan writes of previous presidents. “President Trump walks the walk.”