Tom Homan

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

Thomas Douglas Homan was born November 28, 1961, in West Carthage, New York, into a Roman Catholic family of law-enforcement officers; his father and grandfather were both West Carthage police officers. He earned an associate degree from Jefferson Community College and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from SUNY Polytechnic Institute, became a West Carthage police officer in 1983, and joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a Border Patrol agent in 1984. Over the next three decades he rose through the enforcement ranks; in 2013 the Obama administration appointed him Executive Associate Director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the division that carries out deportations. In November 2015, President Obama conferred on him the Presidential Rank Award as a Distinguished Executive — the federal government’s highest civil-service honor — for deportation efficiency, a bipartisan validation Homan has repeatedly invoked since.

Homan served as Acting Director of ICE from January 2017 to June 2018; Trump nominated him for the permanent post, but the Senate never held confirmation hearings. In April 2018 Homan, alongside CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, advised DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to implement the “Zero Tolerance” policy that separated roughly 5,500 children from their parents at the southern border. He was an open defender rather than a reluctant participant: pressed on family separation during a November 2024 60 Minutes interview, he answered that “families can be deported together.” After leaving ICE in 2018, he spent five years (2019–2024) as a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation — a lead organization behind Project 2025 — appearing frequently on Fox News and developing the operational deportation plans he would later execute.

Homan’s public record includes documented appearances in white-nationalist and extremist-adjacent spaces. He was slated as a keynote speaker at the third America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) on February 25, 2022 — Nick Fuentes’s white-nationalist event — and attended before leaving; afterward he declined to condemn the group, telling HuffPost, “I’m not saying this is a bad group. I’m saying I don’t know.” In October 2024 he spoke at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, a gun-centric Unification-Church splinter event, where, according to The Progressive and the Bucks County Beacon, he delivered remarks invoking what he called the “great white replacement theory.” He became a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR (an SPLC-designated hate group), and in November 2022 launched a border project with The United West, another SPLC-designated hate group.

In September 2024, undercover FBI agents recorded Homan accepting $50,000 in cash in Texas — delivered in a CAVA takeout bag — as part of a probe into an associate who had proposed paying Homan to help secure government contracts in a future Trump administration, according to reporting by MSNBC, ABC News, and Snopes. On November 10, 2024, Trump named Homan “Border Czar,” a White House advisory role that requires no Senate confirmation; the investigation subsequently stalled and was closed by Trump DOJ appointees, who said a review found no credible evidence of wrongdoing. House Judiciary Democrats have demanded release of the recordings, and Homan’s financial-disclosure reports reportedly show no record of the $50,000.

Sources

• “Tom Homan” — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Homan (birth, education, career timeline)
• “‘Meteoric Rise’: How A Fishing Trip And A Phone Call Made Tom Homan ‘Border Czar’” — Daily Caller — March 14, 2025 — https://dailycaller.com/2025/03/14/tom-homan-profile-border-patrol-career-police/ (early career, family background)
• “ERO EAD Thomas Homan receives 2015 Presidential Rank Award” — ICE — November 2015 — https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ero-ead-thomas-homan-receives-2015-presidential-rank-award (Obama award)
• “Heritage Foundation Welcomes Tom Homan, Former Acting ICE Director, as New Visiting Fellow” — Heritage Foundation — https://www.heritage.org/press/heritage-foundation-welcomes-tom-homan-former-acting-ice-director-new-visiting-fellow (2019–2024 fellowship)
• “Trump announces Tom Homan, his former acting ICE director, will be administration’s ‘border czar’” — CNN — November 10, 2024 — https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/10/politics/tom-homan-border-czar-ice-donald-trump/index.html (Border Czar appointment)
• “Breaking down allegation Tom Homan accepted $50K bribe from undercover FBI agents” — Snopes — October 13, 2025 — https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/10/13/tom-homan-bribe/ (FBI sting)