Since returning to power, Homan has threatened to prosecute federal officials for educating immigrant communities on their rights while ignoring a bribery scandal that should make him ineligible for any public servant role
This week, the Trump administration announced that so-called “border czar” Tom Homan would be taking over mass deportation operations in Minnesota, following public outrage over the brutal killing of a second U.S. citizen. Alex Pretti, a VA ICU nurse, had been exercising his right to record immigration enforcement when he was tackled by a mob of federal agents and shot point-blank.
Sending Tom Homan to Minnesota is like sending the fox to oversee the henhouse. After his arrival in Minnesota, he held a press conference. Homan – who served as the acting director of ICE during the first Trump administration – proceeded to make a call for civility that was not directed at federal agents carrying out these deadly shootings. Instead, he directed his ire at Minnesotans who have been demanding justice and accountability for their neighbors. “I begged for the last two months on TV for the rhetoric to stop,” he said. “I said in March, if the rhetoric didn’t stop, there’s going to be bloodshed, and there has been. I wish I wasn’t right.”
He should try to follow his own advice. Homan has ties to notorious anti-immigrant hate groups and during Trump’s first term told immigrant families to live in fear, stating that “You should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.” During a gathering of conservatives in 2024, Homan promised mass havoc if Trump returned to power in 2025, stating that “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen … They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
HOMAN DURING THE FIRST TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: PLANTING THE SEEDS OF CHAOS
Homan’s tenure as acting ICE director planted the seed for the chaos and terror we’re seeing in our communities and streets today. Under Homan’s watch, ICE dramatically stepped up enforcement actions in places that ICE had traditionally avoided, such as courthouses. Multiple lawsuits were filed claiming constitutional violations, with advocates saying enforcement at courthouses silenced victims, rewarded the criminals, and endangered us all by harming public safety. In just one example, ICE detained an undocumented domestic violence victim who came to the local courthouse to file a protective order against her abuser. Courthouse arrests are now common practice in the second Trump era. Under Homan’s watch, the arrests of individuals who posed no public safety threat also increased by 171 percent compared to a year before. ICE also increased the targeting of businesses through workplace raids, including sweeping nearly 100 7-Eleven stores in seventeen states. Under the second Trump administration, raids are now common at the parking lots of Home Depot stores, which are popular gathering spaces for essential immigrant workers. This has come with a body count. In August 2025, 52-year-old day laborer Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez was struck by a car and killed after attempting to flee a Home Depot.
HOMAN DURING THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: SHREDDING DUE PROCESS
Everyone present in the United States, no matter their immigration status or who is currently president, has rights, and the right to know what they are. But during the first year of Trump’s second administration, Homan waged a one-man campaign targeting “Know Your Rights” information that has sought to educate all community members on their rights when encountering mass deportation agents. Following the administration’s invasion of Chicago, Homan complained that “Know Your Rights” information was making it “very difficult” for ICE to sweep up immigrant families. “They call it ‘Know Your Rights,’” he said at the time. “I call it ‘How to escape arrest.’” Homan has in particular become obsessed with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, repeatedly pushing the ridiculous notion that she “could have broken the law by holding a webinar informing immigrants of their rights,” and that the Justice Department should investigate. “It is perfectly legal to know your rights and to educate others about them, too,” she responded. “EVERYONE in the United States, citizen or not, has rights. I will not allow this administration to intimidate us from helping you know about them.” Homan has continued to threaten Americans who are legally exercising their right to observe ICE’s actions.
Q: Are you going to be arresting the leadership of Signal chats that are organizing the attacks against you?HOMAN: The organization and funding of attacks on ICE — they will be held accountable. Justice is coming.
HOMAN’S ROLE IN THE FAMILY SEPARATION CRISIS: TRAUMATIZING KIDS IS OKAY
Homan was such an early advocate of family separation at the southern border that he’s been called the “intellectual father” of the policy by The Atlantic. Homan first pushed that children be ripped from their parents during the Obama administration, pitching the idea of prosecuting and separating families as a deterrent. Homan acknowledged separated families would suffer but essentially said it could always be worse. “Yes, the separated families would suffer, he acknowledged, but at least ‘they’re not dead,’” the report said. While the Obama administration could not stomach the idea, the Trump administration could, piloting the policy beginning in 2017. It ultimately resulted in the separation of more than 5,000 wailing and traumatized children, including nursing infants and toddlers. In 2024, Human Rights Watch estimated that as many as 1,360 children remained separated from their families. Homan has shown a complete lack of empathy or remorse for his part in this humanitarian disaster, stating at a conservative gathering in 2023 that he was “sick and tired hearing about the family separation.” Homan also opined about the legal ramifications of his actions, stating that “You know, I’m still being sued over that, so come get me. I don’t give a shit, right. Bottom line is, we enforced the law.” Family separation was not law. It was state-sponsored cruelty.
HOMAN’S TIES TO WHITE NATIONALISTS AND EXTREMISTS: THE WHITER THE BETTER
During Trump’s first term, but in particular after, Homan built connections to extreme groups linked to white supremacy and became a vocal messenger of deadly conspiracy theories, including ties to anti-immigrant hate groups, such as his participation in a number of events hosted by Tanton network hate groups CIS and FAIR, and using a Fox News contributor role to profusely spreading the dangerous and violence-inducing white nationalist narrative of a migrant “invasion” at the border. In 2024, Homan’s Border911 organization – which ABC News reported has “extensive ties to prominent conspiracy theorists who pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election” – held an event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The event reunited “the architects of Trump’s ugly family separation policy and include others who will undoubtedly carry out his plans to go even further in 2025, including rounding up and deporting Dreamers and hard-working immigrants in the U.S,” Beatriz Lopez, Deputy Director of the Immigration Hub, said at the time. “And this time around, they are prepared to skirt any accountability.” Prescient words: just this week, a federal judge in Minnesota said ICE has violated nearly 100 court orders.
HOMAN’S $50,000 BRIBE SCANDAL: WHAT’S IN THE CARRYOUT BAG?
Homan’s claim that he’s looking to “regain law and order” in Minnesota raises questions – 50,000 of them, to be exact. In 2024, the FBI recorded Homan “accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration,” MS Now reported in September 2025. “The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.” The corruption runs deep: “Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement early in Trump’s first term, openly claimed during the 2024 campaign that he would play a prominent role in carrying out Trump’s promised mass deportations,” as the report notes. Rule of law for thee, never for me.
FURTHER RESOURCES ON THOMAS HOMAN
- Immigration 101: Who is Tom Homan?
- You Have the Right to Know Your Rights, No Matter What Tom Homan Claims
- Rural Americans Stand Up to Tom Homan, Stand With Immigrant Mom and Kids
- Armed Agents Storming Churches, Schools, and Hospitals: The Potential Devastation of Project 2025’s ICE Raids
- Trump and Republicans Seek Massive Expansion of Cruel and Traumatic Family Separation Policy
- Progressive, Immigration, and Latino Organizations Respond to Trump Fundraiser for the Bigoted Conspiratorial Border911
- Mass Deportation: The Ugly and Unpopular Promise Driving a Radicalized GOP
- Trump ICE Head Homan on Second Term Mass-Deportations: “They Ain’t Seen Shit Yet”
