WASHINGTON — Tom Homan spent the past four years angry about illegal immigration. Now he’s back in a position to do something about it, and he’s not pulling any punches.
“I [woke] up every day for the last four years pissed off because the Biden administration took the most secure border in my lifetime and unsecured it on purpose,’’ Homan, 63, a tough-talking former Border Patrol agent, told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland on Saturday. When President Trump asked him to be “border czar,’’ Homan said he responded, “I’ll come back and I’ll do it for free, I’m so pissed off.’’
After taking shots at Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker — both Democrats who have criticized him — he turned his attention to Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox.
“You’re not a police commissioner,’’ Homan said of Cox to the conference crowd after vowing he’d be “bringing hell with me’’ to Boston because of its so-called sanctuary city policies. “Take that badge off your chest, put it in the desk drawer because you became a politician.’’
In a way, the same could be said of Homan, who has transformed from dutiful civil servant — in 2015, he earned the nation’s highest civil service award during the Obama administration — to full-throated Trump supporter and conservative darling. Lured out of retirement this year for the second time by Trump, Homan has become the face of the administration’s mass deportation efforts in his role as border czar.
And some former colleagues said his ramped-up rhetoric is surprising even for someone known for being blunt.
“I never heard the kind of statements from him that are being made in this political, politicized atmosphere,’’ said Gil Kerlikowske, the former commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, who worked with Homan from 2014-17 and described him as pragmatic and “very practical about trying to solve problems’’ back then.
Homan, who ran Immigration and Customs Enforcement for 18 months at the start of the first Trump administration, has taken on a much higher-profile role in the second Trump term. And his rhetoric — honed in speeches at political events such as the 2022 Massachusetts Republican convention and the party’s national convention last summer in Milwaukee — has ramped up to match it.
“I suspect Tom’s personal views might have evolved to this point where he believes in this . . . bare-knuckles, so to speak, approach,’’ said John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director under President Barack Obama who also worked with Homan. “The Tom I knew, I don’t think would have said we’re going to bring hell to a city because of a disagreement with a local police department.’’
The White House did not respond to an interview request for Homan or to questions about his role. But his evolution appears to date to his first stint working for Trump starting a few days after retiring from ICE in January 2017.
“President Trump was the first president I’ve seen who understood the immigration issue inside and out,’’ Homan wrote in his 2020 book, “Defend the Border and Save Lives.’’
Trump immediately took a liking to Homan, who wrote that they spoke at least every two weeks during his stint as acting ICE director.
“He’s a tough guy. He’s a tough cookie,’’ Trump said in praising Homan during a 2017 speech to law enforcement officers. “Somebody said the other day . . . ‘He looks very nasty. He looks very mean.’ I said, ‘That’s what I’m looking for.’ ’’
Homan was one of the first appointees announced by Trump in the second administration. Homan told his local TV station in upstate New York that he would report directly to the president as a sort of “senior policy adviser,’’ making decisions on border security and deportation.
Homan grew up in the small upstate New York village of West Carthage, the son of a police officer. From the fourth grade, Homan wrote in his book, he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and still has his police whistle and notebook. After earning a degree in criminal justice, Homan became a police officer in West Carthage. After about two years, he applied to be a federal Border Patrol agent and began his career in Southern California in 1984.
Then in 2003, he wrote in his book, an incident in Texas “made Tom Homan who he is today.’’ He was on the scene for a deadly human smuggling incident in Victoria in which 19 undocumented immigrants died in a sweltering tractor trailer. One was a young boy about the same age as his son.
“It’s still fresh in my mind, and when I tell the story I still get choked up. I can still smell it, taste it, see it. Tears fill my eyes as I write this,’’ he said in his book. “Don’t let anyone tell you that illegal immigration is a victimless crime.’’
Homan has frequently cited the need to protect women and children from human traffickers as a reason for stopping illegal immigration.
“I always felt like he had a heart,’’ Sandweg said, adding that extends especially to ICE and Border Patrol agents.
But Homan also has been called the father of the Trump administration policy of separating children from parents at the border to deter illegal immigration.
“Most parents don’t want to be separated,’’ Homan told the Atlantic magazine in 2022. “I’d be lying to you if I didn’t think that would have an effect.’’
Homan said in his book that family separation was no different than when a parent is arrested for other offenses.
“Who wants to see videos of crying children? No one,’’ he wrote. “The term [family separation] vilifies the officers for doing their sworn duty to enforce the law.’’
He’s made a similar point about the change in immigration enforcement from the Biden administration, which focused ICE’s limited resources on serious criminals. Under Trump, agents are also apprehending other undocumented immigrants, most with no serious criminal charges, during their sweeps. Homan said that ICE agents have to arrest anyone they encounter who is in the country illegally, and that sanctuary cities that don’t hand over criminal undocumented immigrants in their custody are forcing ICE agents into neighborhoods to find them.
“We’re not going to tell ICE agents, ignore the oath you took, ignore the laws of immigration enforcement, just arrest the criminals. No, we’re taking everybody,’’ Homan told reporters on Feb. 11. “So sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don’t want: more agents in their neighborhoods and more noncriminals being arrested because they forced us into the community.’’
Advocates for tougher immigration enforcement see him as the right person for the job.
“Tom Homan has been at this for a long, long time. There’s nobody who knows the issue better,’’ said Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for reduced legal and illegal immigration. “Even long before November, he’s had a pretty good idea of what it will take to get the border under control and to restore some semblance of legality to the whole process.’’
While there has been a jump in arrests of undocumented immigrants, Homan has acknowleged he wants to see even more. And the pressure to deport more people might have led to his attack on Boston’s police commissioner, Kerlikowske said.
“Law enforcement professionals don’t talk about law enforcement the way he talked about Cox,’’ he said. “And I think it’s all because their numbers aren’t turning out to be what they said’’ they would be.
But Homan has given no indication he’s backing down in his new job.
“I’m proud to be back,’’ he roared as he finished his remarks at CPAC on Saturday, “and I’m not leaving until we fix this [expletive].’’
Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.
