Tom Homan

Tom Homan is a longtime law enforcement official who serves as Pres. Donald Trump’s border czar. In January 2026, after the deaths of two American citizens at the hands of federal officers, Trump dispatched Homan to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to take over the federal government’s contentious crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

Early years

Homan, the son and grandson of police officers, grew up in the farming town of West Carthage in upstate New York. He earned an associate degree in criminal justice from Jefferson Community College and then went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from SUNY Polytechnic Institute. In his early 20s he briefly served as a West Carthage police officer before joining the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in 1984.

Over the next several decades, he moved through the ranks of the INS, working as a border patrol agent, investigator, and supervisor. His assignments included preventing smuggling operations and detaining smugglers along the U.S. southern border. In 2003 he moved to the newly created U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency that was part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

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Obama years

In 2013 Pres. Barack Obama appointed Homan as executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations at ICE. Homan was in charge of finding people facing deportation orders and expelling them from the United States. That year the Obama administration oversaw the deportation of 432,000 undocumented individuals in the United States, the highest number ever recorded. The Obama administration’s record on immigration enforcement earned the president the derisive title “deporter in chief” from immigrant rights groups.

Homan was awarded the 2015 Presidential Rank Award, the government’s highest civil service award, for his work in the field. The DHS praised him for his handling of a big surge of unaccompanied children and families from Central America.

Homan carried out the administration’s priority of deporting undocumented immigrants who had committed crimes or posed a security threat. But he grew increasingly frustrated with his role in dealing with immigration enforcement in a Democratic administration.

Trump’s first term and family separation

Homan wrote in his 2020 book, Defend the Border and Save Lives, that he thought Trump was “right on target” with his immigration ideas, but, like many other people, Homan had assumed that the underdog Trump would lose the 2016 presidential election to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Unhappy with the idea of serving under another Democratic president, Homan decided to take a job in the private sector.

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After Trump’s 2016 victory, the incoming homeland security secretary, John Kelly, told Homan that Trump wanted him to serve as acting ICE director, and Homan took the job. He embraced the role and applauded Trump for “taking the shackles off ICE” by allowing it wider latitude in making arrests. He was, perhaps most notably, one of the chief architects of the highly controversial “family separation” policy, which resulted in more than 5,500 children of immigrants being taken from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018.

The policy spurred so much backlash that it was quickly ended—as was, seemingly, Homan’s career. When it became clear that the Senate would not approve his nomination to become the full-time ICE director, Homan retired.

But Homan spent the years of the Joe Biden administration stewing over what he considered a failed border policy. When Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Homan told Trump that he would “come back for free” to address the immigration crisis.

Trump’s second term and Minneapolis

When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he named Homan border czar, a position that, unlike ICE director, does not require Senate confirmation. (Homan did not come back for free, instead earning $195,200 a year, according to federal records.) He adopted a combative attitude, threatening to arrest local and state officials if they attempted to block ICE enforcement actions. Within days of Trump’s second inauguration, Homan was overseeing immigration operations in cities, including Chicago.

In September 2025, news stories reported that Homan was the subject of a 2024 FBI sting operation in which he accepted a bag with $50,000 in cash from undercover agents posing as people seeking government contracts in Trump’s second term. The Justice Department shut down the bribery investigation in 2025. The White House dismissed the probe as an attempt by the Biden administration to “entrap” a top Trump ally.

In January 2026 the administration’s immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis became a source of national outrage in the wake of the killing of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem angered many Americans when she accused Good of “weaponizing” her vehicle in an attempt to hit an ICE agent. Weeks later Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino claimed that Pretti had come to the scene to “massacre” federal agents despite video evidence to the contrary.

Against that backdrop Trump sent Homan to Minneapolis to oversee operations in what was viewed by many as an attempt to de-escalate tensions. As the Associated Press put it, the demonstrably hard-line Homan “is seen by some as a voice of restraint and moderation compared with some in the current administration.”

In a Truth Social post announcing that he was sending Homan to Minneapolis, Trump wrote, “Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me.” Politically, the move was seen as potentially sidelining Noem, with whom Homan has had a tense relationship.

On his first day in Minneapolis, Homan met with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats. Walz’s office said Homan and Walz agreed on the need for continued dialogue, while Frey called the meeting productive and said his main priority was wrapping up the federal immigration enforcement surge in his city as quickly as possible.

In his first public comments since taking command of the Minnesota operation, Homan noted that his presence in the state was an acknowledgment that the federal agents have not “carried out this mission perfectly.” But he called on local and state leaders to give federal agents access to undocumented individuals being held in jails and prisons, saying that an agreement would allow ICE “to draw down on the number of people we have here.” (State prison officials have said that they have a long-standing practice of turning inmates subject to deportation over to ICE, while individual counties have their own policies.) Finally, Homan defended the federal agents by saying that they were simply enforcing the law; he called on protesters to end “the hateful rhetoric,” suggesting that “if you don’t like what ICE is doing…go protest Congress.”

On February 4, Homan announced that 700 federal agents would be withdrawn from Minnesota as the result of “unprecedented” cooperation between local and federal officials. The drawdown left about 2,000 federal border agents in the state, in what the administration had called its largest immigration operation to date.