U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked Thomas Homan, his one-time acting immigration chief, to serve as “border czar” and fulfill his campaign vow to deport large numbers of undocumented migrants, potentially millions, back to their home countries.
Trump said on his Truth Social media platform late Sunday that the 62-year-old Homan would be “in charge of our Nation’s Borders,” south to Mexico and north to Canada. He added that he has “no doubt” that Homan “will do a fantastic, and long-awaited for, job.”
“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote.
Trump is also set to appoint another immigration hard-liner, Stephen Miller, as deputy chief of staff for policy, U.S. news media reported.
“This is another fantastic pick by the president,” Vice President-elect JD Vance said of the prospect of Miller joining Trump’s nascent administration.
In another appointment, Trump named one of his staunchest Republican advocates in Congress, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, to serve as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, calling her “an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter.”
Stefanik, 40, arrived in the House of Representatives in 2015 as a political moderate but over time has emerged as a vocal Trump defender.
She drew national attention last year for her sharp questioning of Ivy League university presidents over antisemitism on their campuses in the wake of student protests against Israel’s conduct of its war on Hamas militants. Two of the academics, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, stepped down in the fallout from the hearing.
Homan’s appointment as “border czar” does not require Senate confirmation. He served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, from January 2017 to June 2018 during Trump’s first presidential term but left in frustration when the White House failed to push his nomination toward the required confirmation in the Senate.
Homan, a former police officer and Border Patrol agent, subsequently became a Fox News analyst on immigration and border issues.
Hours after his appointment, Homan on Monday told the “Fox & Friends” show: "I've been on this network for years complaining about what [President Joe Biden’s] administration did to this border. I've been yelling and screaming about it and what they need to do to fix it.”
“So, when [Trump] asked me, ‘Would you come back and fix it?’ Of course. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't,” he said. “I'm honored the president asked me to come back and help solve this national security crisis, so I'm looking forward to it.”
Trump recaptured the White House in last week’s election after repeatedly telling thousands of his supporters at campaign rallies that he would round up undocumented migrants in the U.S. – perhaps 11 million or more – and send them back to their home countries.
“We’re going to have to seal up those borders,” Trump often said, claiming that other countries had emptied their prisons and mental health hospitals so migrants could flee to the U.S. He said the migrants in the U.S. are now causing a crime wave. Government statistics show that no such massive increase in crime has occurred.
In addition, immigration officials two months ago told Congress that more than 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide — either in the United States or abroad — are living in the U.S. outside of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.
The immigrants are part of ICE’s “non-detained” list of migrants in the United States.
Officials told Congress that means the migrants have pending immigration cases in the U.S., but they are not currently in detention either because they are not prioritized for detention, they are serving time in a jail or prison for their crimes, or because ICE cannot find them.
In another interview, Homan told Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures” show that military troops would not be used to round up and arrest undocumented immigrants.
ICE, he said, would work to carry out Trump’s plans in a “humane manner" in what will be a “necessary” and “well-targeted, planned operation.”
Another Trump advocate, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, told CNN’s “State of the Union” show on Sunday that deportation efforts would first focus on 1.3 million migrants who have already had court hearings and been rejected for asylum in the U.S., with Homeland Security agents and local police arresting them.
Asked whether 3.6 million children who entered the U.S. with their undocumented parents and have been living for years in the U.S. should also be deported, Jordan said, “That question will be addressed later on.”
Advocates for these migrants, now often young adults, call them “Dreamers,” and some U.S. lawmakers have, unsuccessfully so far, attempted to put them on a path to U.S. citizenship.
In his first term, Trump had pledged to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. Some of the wall was built but Mexico paid for none of it.
In addition, he sought to deport millions of immigrants but fell far short for lack of government financing, legal challenges brought by advocates of migrants and a public outcry over deportation tactics, including the separation of migrant children from their parents, a policy that Homan advocated.
During his tenure as the acting ICE chief, Homan pushed back against allegations that enforcement agents acted too aggressively. In the past, Homan has praised Trump for “taking the shackles” off ICE agents by allowing them to make a broader range of immigration arrests in the U.S. interior.
Homan told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” last month that, as the government has for decades, any mass deportation would prioritize the arrest of criminals and national security threats.
But he also said that anyone in the United States illegally could be returned on flights back to their home countries. He said he would restart raids on workplaces to find people employed illegally in the United States and deport them.
The Biden administration had ended such raids, which Homan said made it easier for employers to hire unauthorized workers, including children.