Future US government: Trump makes hardliner Homan the “border czar”

US President-elect Donald Trump has decided who will oversee the announced mass deportation of irregularly immigrated foreigners. He wants to hand over the role of “border czar” to Tom Homan, who temporarily led an immigration agency during Trump’s first term in office. This means that Homan will also be responsible for all US borders, Trump wrote on his online platform Truth Social.

Homan was the acting head of the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agency in 2017 and 2018. He is considered an advocate of the controversial decision to separate children of illegal immigrants from their parents. After that, it sometimes took years to reunite the families. Homan – and also Trump – later said that the measure was intended as a deterrent so that families would not even try to find their way to the USA.

Homan recently caused a stir in an interview. He was asked on the TV show “60 Minutes” whether a mass deportation campaign would be possible without separating families. Homan’s answer: “Of course it works. Families can be deported together.” Children born in the USA, who are therefore US citizens, would then have to leave the country because their parents immigrated illegally, he argued.

Trump made securing the borders and “the largest deportation operation in US history” a central point of his election campaign. According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, there were an estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States in 2022. Some of them have been in the country for decades. According to Pew figures, they belong to around 6.3 million households with a total of more than 22 million people.