Tom Homan was shaking hands with colleagues around President Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security in Jan. 2017, just days before President Donald Trump was set to take office for the first time. It was Homan’s retirement party, celebrating his more than 30 years of working in immigration enforcement.
But in the middle of saying goodbye to his colleagues, his chief of staff called. It was an emergency, she said. Amid packed-up boxes in his office, Homan took one more call.
On the line was Trump’s incoming Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly.
“I remember him saying, I know it was bad timing, but the president-elect wanted me to stay and run [ICE],” Homan told the Daily Caller.
Homan took the weekend to think about it. He had already accepted a retirement job in the private sector. He needed to talk to his family.
“Monday morning, I called [Kelly] and said I want to come back,” Homan said.
It didn’t end up being the only time Homan would come out of retirement for President Trump. Eight years later, he would end his retirement again to become the infamous border czar. He didn’t even have to think about it the second time.
“Tom’s answered the call every time in the past,” Bob Wallis, a former ICE special agent in charge and Homan’s long time mentor, told the Caller. “It didn’t surprise me when I saw that he was asked to take this very challenging, very challenging position.”
Just days after defeating Kamala Harris, Trump quickly started staffing up his White House. His first pick was Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Tom Homan was the next name on the list. Trump announced that Homan would serve as his “border czar,” a title Republicans mockingly called Vice President Kamala Harris under the Biden administration.
“I think I was the first person he called outside of Susie. He called me on a Friday night and asked me if I felt ready to come back. And I told him I was,” Homan told the Caller.
Coming out of government retirement to take the job was a no-brainer, Homan said, because of the immense border crisis left behind by the Biden administration.
Homan’s role as border czar is a White House job and thus did not require Congressional approval; Homan was clear when Trump offered him a job that he no longer wanted to oversee an agency.
“He asked me what I wanted to do, I said ‘run the border.’ So he gave me the border czar job. Told me to secure the border and run the deportation operation,” Homan told the Caller.
Homan hit the ground running. The 2024 U.S. fiscal year was the second worst in history for illegal immigration, so Homan spent the time between the election and inauguration making plans on how the federal government would execute Trump’s agenda.
By February, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed that the administration had marked the lowest single-day apprehension of illegal crossings in over 15 years, with 200 migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border on Feb. 22.
Homan’s work is a part of what his long-time mentor Bob Wallis calls a “meteoric rise.” Homan has become a hero to the GOP, as social media users and pundits alike create memes and photos celebrating him and the work he is doing on the border crisis.
The border czar’s climb has been years in the making. Homan has worked for six presidents. He started his government career as a border patrol agent under President Ronald Reagan and served in both Bush administrations, and under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Obama honored Homan’s career with the highest civil service award, the Presidential Rank Award, in 2015 for his work deporting illegal immigrants. He was known as the “deporter-in-chief” under the Democratic president.
“I tell people all the time that my job is to work within the framework provided to me by the administration,” Homan told the Caller.
Homan’s journey to becoming the border czar begins in Upstate New York in the mid-1980s. Living in West Carthage, New York, Homan was working as a police officer, just as his grandfather and father once did. All six of his siblings went into public service, becoming either a police officer, firefighter or a nurse.
One day, he and his colleagues went fishing on the St. Lawrence river — a place he went to often as a kid — which in some areas makes up a significant chunk of the New York-Canadian border.
“We ran into a border patrol agent that was docking on Dallas Bay. And I’ve always seen border patrol on that route but didn’t know what they did … when we sat there to talk, he told me what he did,” Homan told the Caller.
A few months later in 1984, Homan took the Border Patrol test and was hired on as an agent.
Homan later transitioned to become an investigator with what was then Immigration and Naturalization Services (its functions have since been split between USCIS, CBP, and ICE). That is where he met Wallis, who he worked under in the Office of Investigations.
In 2003, Wallis and Homan got called to an assignment in Victoria, Texas. More than a dozen migrants had died from suffocation in the back of a truck as they attempted to sneak across the border. The duo found a deceased father and his young son, still wrapped in an embrace, in the truck trailer.
“I was standing next to Tom Homan when he saw that child,” Wallis told the Caller. “I have two daughters, young daughters. At the time, he had a son, and I saw how he reacted to that.”
“You could tell he was just thinking about how it must have been towards the end of that little boy’s life,” Wallis recalled.
“At that moment, I said, this guy’s all in. He’s all in. He’s going to find out why this happened, who was involved, and he’s going to bring him to justice. Now, that’s a cop’s cop,” Wallis added.
Under Obama, Homan rose to be the executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations for ICE. That was the job that was the most impactful in Homan’s eventual appointment to border czar, Wallis explained. It wasn’t easy, and Homan weighed the pros and cons of taking the position with his mentor. Wallis told the Caller that working in immigration enforcement requires one to be fully committed in a way that often impacts family life, especially due to the high volume of travel. But it can also be a fulfilling role and a great career opportunity.
“This is something that’s going to stay with you and allow you to flourish after your career is long over,” Wallis remembers telling Homan.
Homan took the job. He was tasked with carrying out the president’s “prosecutorial discretion” policy, which called on ICE to focus on its efforts on illegal immigrants who were criminals or national security threats. He was also asked to manage the 2014 unaccompanied minor crisis, when a surge of tens of thousands of children crossed the southern border without any parents or guardians.
“We’re sons and daughters. We are family people too. It’s not like we go to work, we take our heart out of our chest and hang it out on our wall … I’ve seen a lot of terrible things in my career,” Homan reflected.
Obama was sharply criticized for placing the children in detention facilities, a decision that was brought up again in response to Trump allegedly putting “kids in cages” during his first term in office. Homan maintains the approach was the best way to keep the nearly 70,000 unaccompanied minors safe and healthy.
“Under [DHS Secretary] Jeh Johnson, when we had a family crisis, we built family residential centers — the so-called ‘cages,’” Homan remembered. “But they weren’t cages at all.”
“We had chain link fence dividers to keep adults away from unrelated children … we had these fences we put up to keep adults away from children who were raped,” he explained. “We built family residential centers. We helped families long enough for those residents to see a judge.”
Homan retired for the second time in 2018 after serving as Trump’s ICE director. He joined the Heritage Foundation as a fellow and was a contributor on Fox News.
Homan also started a nonprofit, Border 911, focused on informing the public of the benefits of a secure border. According to Dale Wilcox, the chief executive officer of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) and a longtime colleague of Homan’s, he wouldn’t accept anything greater than a $1 annual salary at his nonprofit. Homan would never himself tell anyone about that act of altruism, Wilcox said, because of his humble nature.
Homan and Wilcox worked together at the IRLI starting in 2020. While there, Homan helped the organization prepare Freedom of Information Act Requests and was their immigration law enforcement expert and spokesperson. Wilcox told the Caller that Homan turned down multiple six figure contracts for his work with the organization.
Traveling together for years, Wilcox had the opportunity to see Homan behind closed doors. He recalled a trip to Israel where they inspected the country’s border policies. The group’s tour guide outfitted their entire party with hats reading “HOMAN” — much to Homan’s embarrassment.
“Everywhere we would go, we couldn’t have a meal without people coming up and asking for a photo, saying something to him, asking for an autograph. He was always very gracious. I never saw him once turn someone away,” Wilcox told the Caller.
Both Wallis and Wilcox raved about Homan’s passion for his work. Today, Homan is often doing emotional TV hits, speaking with great intensity about the border crisis and the cases he is working on. Wallis encouraged people to read Homan’s book to help understand what Homan has seen during his career and how that motivates him to keep going.
“This man is a machine. He is tireless. He lives on energy drinks. Everywhere he would go, we’d have to find him an energy drink … it was mostly Red Bull,” Wilcox said.
Once, while traveling to Florida for an event, Homan began struggling with some back issues.
“His back went out as he was getting out of the car, and they literally had to cut the clothes off the man and take him to the hospital. He refused. I mean, he was already having issues and needed surgery, and he refused. He just kept going. This man’s a machine,” Wilcox asserted.
The administration is already celebrating the early success of Homan’s work as the border czar. Vice President JD Vance took his first trip to the southern border since taking office in early March, flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Senior agency officials told the New York Post that, in less than two months, ICE has already yielded a quarter of the 114,000 arrests made in the entire final year of the Biden administration.
But Vance reminded reporters during the trip that there is still work to do. Homan is aware of the monumental task ahead of him and his years of experience will fuel him to finish what he’s started.
“People are asking me, ‘Why are you yelling at members of Congress? Why are you so emotional?’” Homan told the Caller. “Because if they saw what I saw in my career, they would understand that a secure border saves lives.”
AUTHOR
White House correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.
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