The security detail for President Donald Trump’s border czar comes at a sky-high price.
It costs $1 million a month to protect Tom Homan, a report by CBS News said Friday. That total was reportedly provided by a Trump administration official, who said the salaries of Homan’s bodyguards cost $500,000 each month in addition to the fees from their airfare, hotel bills, and other travel expenses.
Homan, 63, is protected by a “rotating detail of special agents from DHS’s investigative arm,” CBS reported. A source told the network that this includes 30 agents who trade off to provide round-the-clock protection.
Costs to protect the border czar come from the Department of Homeland Security, which Kristi Noem heads. A spokesperson for the agency defended the costs in a statement to CBS that claimed Homan is particularly vulnerable to threats.
“DHS ensures our leaders are safe and protected,” Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin told CBS. She reportedly added that “dangerous rhetoric” surrounding the Trump administration’s controversial immigration policies means Homan and other officials have experienced an increase in threats and doxxing.
The Biden administration did not have a separate “border czar” to compare protection costs to. That title was occasionally given to his vice president, Kamala Harris, who received her protection from the U.S. Secret Service.
A 60 Minutes report said in February that Trump’s former national security advisers, John Bolton and Robert O’Brien, whom the U.S. Secret Service guarded during the Biden administration, cost a total of $12 million a year to protect.
A source told CBS News that there are internal discussions as to whether Homan “needs as much security as he has requested.” One official described the level of protection he receives as “extravagant,” adding that the sheer size has allegedly “sucked resources away from other senior leadership, including other cabinet members.”
The report added that Homan occasionally travels in a four-vehicle motorcade, which is double the size of the two-car package cabinet members typically use.
McLaughlin suggested that the costs to shield Homan will not go down.
“We will continue to take measures to ensure Mr. Homan and his family are safe,” she told CBS.
Homan, like Noem, has been one of the faces of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which includes him regularly going on Fox News and other news networks to defend the administration’s actions and to tout its plans to deport millions.
In one of those appearances, in February, Homan told Fox News that he has “state troopers around my house 24-7 right now because of death threats.”
The post Taxpayers Paying Shocking Sum to Protect Trump’s Border Czar appeared first on The Daily Beast.
