Tom Homan, the man president-elect Donald Trump has selected to serve as “border czar,” defended his family separation policy at an extremist festival last month surrounded by QAnon promoters, election conspiracists, and church leaders wearing crowns of bullets.
“Trump comes back, I come back, And I will run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen,” Homan told a cheering crowd at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, a three-day celebration in Greeley, Pennsylvania, organized by the Rod of Iron Ministries, a far-right gun sect that worships AR-15s.
Homan, who was officially appointed as “border czar” by Trump this week, was one of the main architects of the “zero tolerance” policy during Trump’s first term, forcibly separating more than 5,000 children from their parents between 2017 and 2018.
During his speech in Greeley last month, Homan defended the policy.
“Children were dying, women were being raped. Zero tolerance was about maybe if we start prosecuting these people, then they’ll stop coming,” Homan said. “Now, it's unfortunate when you separate a family. It's always unfortunate. I was a cop in New York. Police officers separate families every day, thousands of times a day, when a parent goes to jail. That's just the sad reality.”
Homan was introduced on stage by Justin Moon, a firearms manufacturer and the son of Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, a global religious cult whose adoring followers were known as Moonies. Homan shared the stage with far-right figures that included Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec and Ivan Raiklin, the self-styled “secretary of retribution” who created a “deep state target list” of Trump’s enemies who he wants rounded up and arrested. Also speaking at the event were prominent QAnon promoter Mel K, disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Craig Sawyer, a former Navy Seal who has promoted various conspiracy theories including human trafficking and pedophilia rings.
At the festival, Homan also pushed the baseless claim that the immigrants were being allowed into the country to help Vice President Kamala Harris win the election. This was a conspiracy theory that was promoted heavily by pro-Trump election denial groups in the months leading up to the election.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the first administration in the history of this nation who unsecured a border on purpose,” Homan said. “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.” Homan called this the “great white replacement theory”: “These millions of people that are released into sanctuary cities across this country who will be counted in the next census, which means what? 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 then outlined his dystopian vision for unauthorized immigrants under a second Trump administration, dismissing criticisms that his plan was racist and promising to enact the “biggest deportation operation in the history of the United States.”
In an interview last month with 60 Minutes, Homan fleshed out those plans, announcing that the practice of mass arrests of unauthorized immigrants at workplaces would be revived. When asked about parents being separated from their children who were US citizens, Homan replied, “families can be deported together.”
Homan and the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Homan began his career in West Carthage, New York, as a police officer before joining what was then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a border patrol agent in 1984. He worked as an agent, investigator, and supervisor before being appointed in 2013 by then-president Barack Obama to be the executive associate director for enforcement and removal operations—a role for which he won the Presidential Rank Award in 2015.
During this time, Homan first floated the idea of separating children from their families as a way of deterring immigrants from crossing the border illegally.
In 2017 he was appointed acting director of ICE less than two weeks into Trump’s first term. He then formalized the child separation policy alongside Stephen Miller, who this week was named Trump’s deputy chief of staff.
In 2022, Homan joined the Heritage Foundation as a visiting fellow, where he would go on to contribute a section that outlined the mass arrests and deportations of immigrants to Project 2025, the policy playbook that outlines what a second Trump term would look like. Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 before the election and repeatedly promised he would not employ anyone in his administration who was linked to it.
The same month he joined the Heritage Foundation, Homan was also slated to be a keynote speaker at the America First Political Action Conference in Florida that was organized by white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes. Homan was about to go onstage to deliver his remarks when, he claimed to the Huffington Post, he Googled Fuentes and decided to skip his speech when he saw an article outlining Fuentes’ defense of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“I’m not saying this is a bad group,” he told the Huffington Post when asked for his thoughts on Fuentes and his followers, known as groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know.”
In 2023, Homan joined the America Project, an organization founded by Flynn and Patrick Byrne, one of the main promoters and funders of election denialism.
Homan served as CEO of the organization until he launched a nonprofit called Border911 in October 2023, according to an investigation by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting that found Homan had spent the past 12 months crisscrossing the country, pushing conspiracy theories about illegal immigrants.
In an interview with Fox News this week, Homan claimed that Trump’s administration would “prioritize public safety threats and national security threats first,” before adding, “If you’re in the country illegally, you shouldn’t feel comfortable.”
