Press "Enter" to skip to content

Trump taps former immigration official Thomas Homan as border czar

Kawundo.com

Spread the love

President-elect Donald Trump has picked former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan to serve as a “border czar” for the incoming administration.

Trump’s selection of Homan, 62, for the post was widely expected.

“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote as he announced Homan’s new job on the Truth Social platform late Sunday night. Homan’s duties will include overseeing the borders with Mexico and Canada, as well as the U.S. coastline and airspace, Trump said.

Trump, who has promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, said that would also be part of Homan’s portfolio. “Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin,” Trump wrote.

In his second week in office in 2017, Trump appointed Homan as the acting director of ICE. In November of that year, Trump nominated him to be ICE’s permanent director, but the Senate never acted on his nomination.

Homan played a key role in designing and carrying out Trump’s highly controversial family separation policy, under which children crossing the southern border into the U.S. without legal permission were separated from their parents or other adults so those people could be criminally prosecuted. The policy, sometimes referred to as “zero tolerance,” began in 2017 and ramped up in early 2018 before the administration backed away from it after large numbers of Americans denounced it as inhumane.

Homan is expected to be part of the White House staff and would not be subject to Senate confirmation. He would not have legal authority over the federal agencies involved in managing the border, so would have to direct their activities through others who have Senate confirmation or are installed in those posts through designations as acting officials or by recess appointments.

Trump officially retired from ICE in 2018. In a strange episode the following year, Trump announced Homan was returning as “border czar” — an announcement that took Homan by surprise. Homan told lawmakers the following month that he’d never accepted the position. He never returned to the administration but remained a vocal supporter of Trump’s tough immigration policy in the media and elsewhere.

Follow Kawundo.com on X and Facebook for breaking news on your feed. All day, every day.

Be First to Comment

Leave a Reply

Enable Notifications OK No thanks