When I saw President Donald Trump’s newly-selected “border czar,” Tom Homan, speak at the National Conservatism Conference this past July, it seemed that everyone in the political world was already certain he would have a role in a second Trump Administration. Homan, who spoke on a panel titled “An Immediate End to the Border Crisis,” looked a bit jet-lagged; he told the audience he had just gotten back from campaigning with Trump. He sat beside Mark Krikorian, a longtime colleague who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank and a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group founded by white nationalist John Tanton.
On the panel, the two men voiced support for an end to birthright citizenship and to asylum for immigrants—policies which Trump would begin pushing for immediately following his Inauguration six months later. But Homan took things a step further: When an audience member posited that then President Joe Biden pursued policies to intentionally leave the border unsecured in order to attract undocumented immigrants who would inflate the U.S. Census and vote for Democrats, Homan defended the questioner’s premise, while Krikorian demurred.
Over the past several years, Homan has openly expressed similar ideas about immigration while surrounding himself with groups of white nationalists and racist conspiracy theorists whose stated beliefs are extreme even by the current standards of the Republican Party. In October of 2024, he spoke at the Rod of Iron Festival, a pro-Trump, arms-manufacturer-funded festival in rural Pennsylvania run by the cultish Unification Church. While not the festival’s most controversial appearance—Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security advisor,also spoke there, and declined to condemn the possibility of executing anti-Trump government officials when asked about the idea by an audience member—Homan stood out for his extreme rhetoric. At one point, he went on a disturbing rant about what he called the “great white replacement theory,” claiming that Biden had pursued policies which “unsecure[d] the border on purpose” in order to usher in a replacement of white people in the United States. (The Great Replacement, a racist and antisemitic conspiracy theory which posits that the government is intentionally decreasing the white population through immigration and other means, has also been promoted by Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, and has been cited by multiple mass shooting suspects in recent years.)
Homan, a former New York State police officer, joined the Border Patrol in 1984, and was appointed to an executive associate director position at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) under President Barack Obama, who awarded him the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award for civil service in 2015. He was promoted to ICE director by Trump in 2017, and shortly after that, proposed the administration’s family separation policy, which was widely denounced as inhumane and declared a violation of international law by Amnesty International.
After leaving the first Trump Administration, Homan joined Fox News as a commentator and the Heritage Foundation as a visiting fellow, where he helped write the infamous Project 2025 (also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project). He also founded Border 911, a dark money non-profit that pushed disinformation about immigrants smuggling fentanyl across the border. (According to the libertarian Cato Institute, the vast majority of fentanyl in the United States is smuggled into the country by American citizens.)
Border 911 is part of The America Project, a rightwing border-focused organizing network founded by Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. Like Flynn, Byrne is a major proponent of the QAnon conspiracies, and has bragged about funding efforts to raise public pressure toward pardoning those facing charges related to the January 6, 2021, insurgency at the U.S. Capitol. (Trump issued a pardon of the January 6 defendants shortly after his inauguration.)
Patrick Byrne, former CEO of Overstock.com, speaks via live stream at the January 6 Pardon press conference in Washington, D.C., January 2025. (Photo: Zach Roberts)
Should Homan be afforded the level of control over the U.S. border that Trump intends, the next four years will likely see a devastating shift in immigration policy. Homan has repeatedly promised that he will run “the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.” After his panel at the National Conservatism Conference in July, I asked him if his deportation would operate on the scale of “Operation Wetback,” the infamous Eisenhower-era deportation initiative that saw legal Mexican immigrants removed from the United States alongside undocumented immigrants. He told me that Trump’s initiative will be “more controlled” than Operation Wetback, which was notoriously disorganized in its execution.
Homan has also advocated sending the Border Patrol into sanctuary cities, which the first Trump Administration had also threatened, and has said he’s willing to spend “twice as many resources” on those cities, as well as pursuing legal action against those who aid undocumented immigrants. And he’ll have the backing of some in local law enforcement: In an interview with NBC News, Homan said,
I’ve got a lot of sheriffs that come to me and can’t wait for the 287(g) program [legislation which allows state and local law enforcement to aid ICE in enforcing immigration law] to be ramped back up.
“Sheriffs are skilled at using the criminal legal system to detain, arrest, and put people into ICE custody,” says Jessica Pishko, a journalist who writes about the political power of sheriffs. Pishko tells The Progressive she believes that sheriffs across the country will jump at the opportunity to help ICE carry out deportations. “While this is a relatively newer phenomenon (from the past few decades),” Pishko says,
I think that sheriffs and the far-right sheriff movement have embraced the idea that they can play an important role in ‘protecting’ people from immigrants, whom they cast as threats to public safety.
Similarly, Dr. Reece Jones, a political geographer at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa who studies borders and migration, points to the U.S. Border Patrol’s presence in American streets during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as a harbinger of how Homan’s border agenda could be enacted. “Who are the ones defending that federal building?” says Jones. “Aggressively attacking people in the streets, grabbing people off the streets in unmarked vehicles in the middle of the night? That was all the Border Patrol, right? So they have already shown that they are willing to do these really expansive and troubling things.” This time, Jones fears, Border Patrol will be “much more ready to be more aggressive on these things,” and “do a better job of implementing them.”
President Trump has already begun pushing his anti-immigrant terror campaign by signing a de facto end to birthright citizenship, threatening to withhold fire relief from California if the state doesn’t comply with deportations, and informing ICE that its agents are now allowed to enter churches and schools. Civil Rights organizations are already suing to stop the unconstitutional birthright citizenship executive order, but that might be the point as it would likely send the decision to the Supreme Court. As we saw in the last Trump administration, the point was spreading fear and uncertainty in immigrant communities.
The day after the inauguration Homan went on Fox News to brag about the rollout. “Sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don’t want, more agents in the communities, more people arrested, more collaterals arrested,” he said.
So that’s a game they want to play? Game on.
Zach D. Roberts is a photojournalist covering the far right in America and is a Puffin Foundation artist, and the producer of Greg Palast’s latest documentary ‘Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman.’