President-elect Donald Trump announced via social media that former ICE Director and Project 2025 contributor Tom Homan will become his “border czar” and will “be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin." Homan’s appointment is evidence that Trump’s disavowal of the right-wing policy agenda was a cynical lie meant to protect him from public reaction to its unpopular agenda, as some of his supporters are openly gloating.
Homan, like Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, spoke at this year’s National Conservatism Conference, a gathering “shot through” with “far-right triumphalism, civilizational war, xenophobia and existential threat,” in the words of researchers Annika Brockschmidt and Ben Lorber. Homan pledged “I will run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”
In October, Homan joined other far-right MAGA figures at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival hosted by a cult whose leader wears a crown of bullets and teaches that Jesus Christ “is an assault weapons manufacturer.”
Homan, an architect of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, embodies the ways that Trump’s MAGA movement has embraced far-right and anti-democratic forces. He was scheduled to speak at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference in 2022, and arrived at the conference in Orlando before backing out at the last minute because, he said, he came across Fuentes praising Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; even then he declined to denounce Fuentes.
Homan was also advertised as a speaker at a 2022 “Patriots Arise” conference sponsored by QAnon activists, though he apparently did not end up attending.
On the campaign trail in October, Trump pledged to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (part of the Alien and Sedition Acts), which the Independent wrote, “which would give the president unprecedented ability to target foreigners for removal, without a hearing or due process, based solely on their place of birth or citizenship.”
