With Donald Trump headed back to the White House, the Republican is likely to turn to a familiar, highly controversial face to oversee his signature issue of immigration.
Tom Homan, who served as the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement between 2017 and 2018, is considered one of the key architects of the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy.
Under the initiative, immigration officials broke with the longstanding practice of keeping migrant families together and out of detention, instead sending parents to immigration court for removal proceedings and children to the care of a separate agency.
Immigration offenses are considered civil violations, not criminal ones, and many of the families first presented as asylum-seekers, but they were soon on the fast track out of the country.
The practice separated at least 5,000 families, many permanently, as parents were sent abroad and the Trump administration initially declined to keep track of where they ended up. As of this May, an estimated 1,400 families remained apart.
Trump has been eager to bring Homan, a Project 2025 contributor, back into the fold, telling a radio host during the campaign, “He’s coming on board.”
That would mean Homan would likely be involved in Trump’s stated goal of carrying out the “largest deportation operation in American history” through federal, state, and local law enforcement by invoking the same 1798 law used to carry out mass Japanese internment during WWII.
As Homan boasted during a conference in July, “They ain’t seen s*** yet…Wait until 2025.”
When asked in a recent ‘60 Minutes’ interview about whether that operation would entail returning to family separation, Homan suggested it “needs to be considered absolutely.”
“Their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally,” Homan explained. “So he created that crisis.”
According to reporting from The Atlantic, Homan may have been the first government official to seriously propose intentional family separation back in 2014, though officials dismissed this at the time as “heartless and impractical,” given both the moral and logistical costs of separating children from their families.
The proposal later found a receptive ear in Donald Trump, who launched his 2016 campaign demonizing Mexican migrants as drug dealers and rapists and made cracking down on immigration a signature issue.
Homan told The Atlantic he was inspired to propose the family separation idea after witnessing the aftermath of grisly trafficking and violence on the border.
“The goal wasn’t to traumatize,” he told the magazine. “The goal was to stop the madness, stop the death, stop the rape, stop the children dying, stop the cartels doing what they’re doing.”
