The person President-elect Donald Trump would go on to faucet as his “border czar” spent the final a number of years making appearances on a number of the most excessive right-wing media shops within the nation — together with a program hosted by an Adolf Hitler-admiring QAnon conspiracist — and promising to implement a brutal regime of mass deportations if Trump returns to the White Home.
Tom Homan could have that chance in January, when Trump is inaugurated because the forty seventh president.
Homan has been auditioning for a high-profile Trump White Home function in elements of the right-wing institution — notably, as a Fox Information commentator and as a fellow on the Heritage Basis, a conservative assume tank. He was among the many authors of Venture 2025, Heritage’s authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump administration.
However Homan has additionally been a fixture within the fever swamps of far-right media, lending the imprimatur of his resumé to white nationalist, anti-Muslim and QAnon figures. These appearances and interviews, a few of which have gone unreported within the mainstream press, point out Homan is ready to go to excessive lengths to stem the “invasion,” as he places it, of the nation by immigrants.
Homan didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark for this story.
Homan served as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation department below former President Barack Obama, serving to that administration eject a report variety of immigrants from the nation. Then, as appearing head of ICE throughout the first Trump administration, Homan oversaw a few of its most notorious insurance policies, together with the separation of migrant kids from their households. He left that function in 2018 and started a profession as an anti-immigration pundit on Fox.
However Homan has additionally been a frequent visitor on lesser-known packages, together with the “Patriot Streetfighter” podcast hosted by Scott McKay. In a latest story about McKay threatening an area decide, Information Channel 5 in Nashville described his historical past of extremist rhetoric:
A distinguished determine within the extensively mocked and discredited QAnon conspiracy motion, McKay himself has claimed that People are secretly residing on Mars, recommended that Jared Kushner could also be a clone created by the Chinese language authorities, argued that Jews are pulling the levers of “every institution of power on Earth,” praised Adolf Hitler for “fighting the same people that we’re trying to take down today” and threatened to “put … bullets inside” medical professionals concerned within the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
McKay made all of these statements previous to October 2023, when Homan appeared on his livestreamed podcast. The pair spoke for about an hour, and have been joined by Chris Burgard, a producer for a “two-year educational program” Homan created known as “Defend the Border and Save Lives.”
In that dialog, Homan warned McKay that “what’s happening on the border” below President Joe Biden may result in “the biggest national security failure since 9/11,” and recommended males from “countries who sponsor terrorism” have been pouring into the U.S.
McKay recounted how he and Homan had met at Mar-a-Lago throughout a fundraiser the place Homan was screening a movie. This was a doable reference to a November 2022 occasion at Trump’s Florida property, which the Southern Poverty Regulation Heart reported was organized by Homan and the United West, an Islamophobic group that claims it’s devoted to stopping “the invasion of millions of illegal aliens, many of whom are HAMAS and Marxist collaborators.”
United West and Homan collaborated on “Death County & The River Of Broken Dreams,” a documentary that includes footage of Homan on the Texas-Mexico border fearmongering about immigrants. The movie was posted to YouTube in July 2023.
Homan’s relationship with United West is alarming. The group, listed by the SPLC an anti-Muslim hate group, is led by Tom Trento, who for over a decade has claimed that the U.S. is at battle with Islam.
“I knew all my years of academic work in Islam and related areas of law enforcement and activism would be required in what will be an extended, vicious, deadly, horrible war in a clash of two incompatible civilizations, the Judeo-Christian West and Islam,” Trento wrote in 2015.
Trento additionally traveled with Homan to Israel final 12 months. Collectively, they produced movies that have been posted to Rumble, a platform that has turn out to be a haven for far-right extremists. One video reveals Homan visiting the West Financial institution and talking with Dany Tirza, a former Israel Protection Forces colonel who was the architect of Israel’s border partitions on the West Financial institution and the Sinai Peninsula. Homan and Tirza mentioned methods for constructing border obstacles. “I’m glad that we constantly trade technology on how to protect our borders,” Homan advised Tirza.
In October 2023, not lengthy after his journey to Israel, Homan registered a brand new nonprofit known as the Border911 Basis to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border,” IRS filings present. The inspiration promoted a coverage agenda that “foreshadows Trump’s most extreme immigration proposals, which include mass deportations and deploying troops to the U.S.-Mexico border,” in accordance with a joint investigation by 5 information collectives.
Whereas selling Border911, Homan made appearances throughout far-right media. Earlier this 12 months he appeared on “Loomer Unleashed,” a present on Rumble hosted by Laura Loomer, the extremist MAGA influencer who made headlines this fall for growing a detailed relationship with Trump on the marketing campaign path.
Loomer has advocated executing Trump’s political enemies; stated a decide overseeing one of many president-elect’s legal trials ought to be deported; known as for the mass deportation of Muslims; referred to Black congresswomen with racial slurs; pushed the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy concept; and spoken in genocidal phrases about Palestinians, saying Israel ought to “flatten” Gaza. She enjoys a pleasant relationship with Nick Fuentes, the Hitler-admiring white supremacist chief of the pro-Trump “groyper” motion.
“What is your reaction to just the failed House GOP leadership tonight and the four Republicans who voted against the measure to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas?” Loomer requested Homan, referring to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) try in February to question Biden’s Homeland Safety secretary over his dealing with of immigrants on the southern border.
(Democrats noticed the hassle as much less of a authentic impeachment inquiry and extra of a political stunt meant to push an excessive anti-immigrant agenda.)
“We could’ve had him impeached tonight if it wasn’t for four Republicans,” Loomer went on. “What is your message to the obstructionist Republicans that are participating in this active infiltration and invasion of America?”
“I think what they’ve done is a travesty,” a clearly agitated Homan stated, later including: “I’m pissed off that you got four Republican congressmen who didn’t vote to impeach this man. What is it gonna take?”
Loomer additionally requested Homan for his ideas about Maher Bitar, a Palestinian American who Biden selected as Director of Intelligence. Loomer baselessly described Bitar as a “jihadist Muslim” with “terror ties.”
“I’m shocked by what you just told me,” Homan stated. “I’m gonna start putting pressure on people on the Hill to have oversight hearings. Look, how’d this guy pass vetting?”
Extra lately, simply weeks earlier than Trump’s election victory, Homan made an look at an extremist pageant the place his fellow audio system included QAnon conspiracists and “church leaders wearing crowns of bullets,” per a report from Wired.
“Trump comes back, I come back, and I will run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen,” Homan advised the gang on the Rod of Iron Freedom Competition in Greeley, Pennsylvania. The occasion was organized by the Rod of Iron Ministries, a far-right pro-Trump spiritual group whose members revere AR-15s and brandish them throughout church providers.
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Throughout his speech, in accordance with Wired, Homan pushed a model of the Nice Substitute concept, a white supremacist fable that has impressed a number of mass shootings, and claimed that Democrats have been permitting immigrants into the nation to sway the election for Kamala Harris.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the first administration in the history of this nation who unsecured a border on purpose,” Homan stated. “This isn’t an accident, this isn’t incompetence, this is by design, folks. … They obviously perceive a future political advantage, thinking maybe they are future Democratic voters.”
“These millions of people that are released into sanctuary cities across this country who will be counted in the next census, which means what?” Homan continued. “More seats in the House for the Dems. They’ll own the House forever. This is what they want. They sold this country out for future political power. And to me, that’s treasonous. There’s no other excuse for it.”
Homan is about to start his tenure as “border czar” after Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.
