When President Donald Trump announced that border czar Tom Homan would be taking over immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, many anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement critics, conservatives, and media commentators sighed a breath of relief.
Instead of the firebrand Greg Bovino, Minneapolis would get an adult in the room at last: someone who worked under Democratic and Republican presidents, who had more experience with enforcement operations, and who has been relatively quiet as Trump’s mass deportations have unfolded this year.
Key takeaways
- Trump has tasked his “border czar” Tom Homan with handling immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, replacing the Border Patrol official who oversaw the DHS surge to the city that resulted in the killing of two citizens.
- The move has been greeted by politicians and commentators as a sign that a more serious, less showboaty leader will now be in charge and will deescalate tensions in the city.
- But Homan himself has a checkered past — and it’s useful to revisit that past as he is lauded.
Homan himself seemed to strike this contrast during his first news conference on Thursday after meeting with state and local leaders this week. “I didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines,” he said. “You haven’t seen me.”
Given how outrageous Bovino’s leadership was, how chaotic ICE and Customs and Border Protection’s operations in Minneapolis have been, and how much bad press Trump and Bovino were getting from their own allies, one could be forgiven for believing that anyone would be an improvement.
Still, a closer look at Homan’s record reveals a more complicated — and potentially disturbing — picture.
His actions, his statements, and his prior controversies suggest that he is something other than the moderating “adult in the room” that he has been presented as by the Trump administration.
Is Homan a conciliator who can work with both sides?
Homan’s charge was greeted warmly by Republican lawmakers.
“Tom is the expert’s expert and has dedicated his life to enforcing immigration law and policy in both Democrat and Republican administrations,” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham remarked online after Trump’s announcement.
“There is no one who understands deportations better than Tom Homan,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) said. And Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) called Homan’s dispatch “a positive development — one that I hope leads to turning down the temperature and restoring order in Minnesota.”
To some extent, these hosannas have some validity.
Homan has a long history of working within the nation’s immigration and border apparatus. Before the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency was established, he worked for its predecessor agencies. Still, it wasn’t until President Barack Obama’s first term that he rose through the ranks and achieved some measure of national prominence.
When left-wing critics described Obama as the “deporter-in-chief,” they were really referring to Homan, who served as ICE’s director of enforcement removal operations starting in 2013.
That was a historic year for deportations, as the Obama administration oversaw more than 400,000 of them.
Similarly, Homan was praised for the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of a surge of unaccompanied minors and families, primarily from Central America, during Obama’s second term. Homan was credited — and awarded — for all of this.
Obama “believed in border enforcement. He took steps to secure the border,” Homan told the New York Times about that time. “So I did my job. I take it President Obama thought I did it pretty well, and he gave me an award.”
On January 13, 2016, Homan received the 2015 Presidential Rank Award, which ICE called “the nation’s highest civil service award,” bestowed by the president to “top career executive and senior professionals for consistently demonstrating strength, integrity and commitment to public service.”
After Trump first won in 2016, he asked Homan to serve as ICE’s acting director, where he would go on to make headlines for saying that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid” and for promising a strong domestic enforcement program.
Critics described this as “fear-mongering” at the time. Asked in 2023 if he regretted his rhetoric, Homan doubled down. “I stand by that statement,” he said. “If you’re in the country illegally, you shouldn’t be comfortable. You should be concerned because you broke our laws.”
Homan would also go on to play a key role in the family separation policy that resulted in 2018’s “kids in cages” news cycle — though he has argued that “it wasn’t about, ‘Let’s see how we can harm these people.’ It [was] about doing what we could so people wouldn’t put themselves in the hands of criminal cartels to get raped and get killed.”
“Now, hindsight being 20/20,” he conceded, “the [family] reunification process could have been better.”
That whole episode would result in more than 5,500 children being taken from their parents. It took years for hundreds of these families to be reunited.
And the controversy resulted in Homan’s retirement.
Are Homan’s views less radical than those of Greg Bovino or Stephen Miller?
Compared to his peers in Trump 2.0, Homan has been less of a visible figure than he was originally expected to be.
He returned to the White House last year, trumpeted as Trump’s “border czar” who would seal up the southern border with Mexico, restrict legal and illegal immigration, and oversee the mass deportation program that Trump had promised during the 2024 campaign.
He was charged with domestic operations — working in New York City and Chicago to step up arrests, detentions, and deportations in sanctuary cities — but gained the most attention in 2025 for his confrontations with Democratic politicians like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over her support of ICE protests, “Know Your Rights” education drives, and his track record during Trump 1.0.
He emerged as a kind of Trump bulldog, appearing on cable news, giving press conferences to criticize “sanctuary city” policies, and defending the administration’s deportation tactics — including when facing off against courts and senators for deportations to El Salvador in 2025.
It would also be a stretch to say that Homan’s rhetoric and tone have been measured.
At one point, back in 2019, for example, he reflected on speaking before a congressional hearing about his Trump 1.0 tenure, telling Fox News that he “hesitated a minute before I started yelling because I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room.”
“That man” was a US Congress member.
Last year, he threatened local officials in Boston for not wanting to cooperate with immigration officials, saying, “I’m coming to Boston, and I’m bringing hell with me.”
At another point, speaking of Mexican cartels, he threatened military action, saying they “would be foolish to take on the military” and would “expect violence to escalate…because the cartels are making record amounts of money…and [w]e’re taking money out of their pocket.”
Still, he’s not been as extreme as Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino, or DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who have all taken a much more antagonistic approach in their more recent showdowns with Democratic politicians, activists, protesters, and immigrants themselves.
For one, he hasn’t explicitly accused anyone of “domestic terrorism” or of being “domestic terrorists” like Bovino, Miller, and Noem have. He did say, however, that if “you look up this definition of terrorism,” Renee Good’s actions “certainly could fall within that definition.”
Part of this results from reported distancing and feuding between Homan and Noem over style, contracts, and heated personal rivalries.
Also, unlike Miller, Bovino, and Noem, Homan has previously defended due process and the courts system, saying: “People have a right to claim asylum. They have a right to due process. And you know what? They do.”
Still during Trump 2.0, he has been critical of “Know Your Rights” civic education initiatives. He’s called them efforts to “defy ICE” and impede law enforcement: “They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it how to escape arrest.”
That said, Homan is no Boy Scout. Homan has denied associations with white supremacist groups and far-right militias, like the Proud Boys.
You also might remember a specific and lurid allegation about Homan — namely, that in September 2024, he accepted $50,000 delivered in a paper bag from undercover agents posing as contractors seeking government contracts during the 2024 election.
The White House and Justice Department both came to his defense when the story broke in 2025, saying it was an effort to “entrap” him.
Has Homan criticized ICE/CBP maximalism?
More recently, Homan has been a bit more critical and careful around enforcement operations, given the optics of him coming in to clean up the mess created by his predecessor in Minneapolis.
He’s admitted mistakes in the past, saying, “Nothing’s perfect, anything can be improved on, and what we’ve been working on is making this operation safer, more efficient, by the book.” He’s emphasized “targeted” work in Minnesota repeatedly and claimed that DHS’s “mission is going to improve because of the changes we’re making internally.”
He hasn’t fully thrown Noem, Bovino, and Miller under the bus yet, but he has suggested a reversal to how things have been operating, saying that his “main focus now is draw-down based upon the great conversations I’ve had with your state and local leaders.”
This track record demonstrates why nuance is required in any analysis of Homan’s rise. But more importantly, it is an example of a trend in the Trump era: Controversial figures can often end up being normalized because of the sheer number and degree of extremity of the figures surrounding the president. Who’s Homan, when you’ve dealt with Bovino, Noem, and Miller?
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