Trump’s ‘Border Czar’ Pick Has Been Auditioning For The Role On Extremist Media Platforms

The man President-elect Donald Trump would go on to tap as his “border czar” spent the last several years making appearances on some of the most extreme right-wing media outlets in the country — including a program hosted by an Adolf Hitler-admiring QAnon conspiracist — and promising to implement a brutal regime of mass deportations if Trump returns to the White House. 

Tom Homan will have that opportunity in January, when Trump is inaugurated as the 47th president. 

Homan has been auditioning for a high-profile Trump White House role in parts of the right-wing establishment — notably, as a Fox News commentator and as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He was among the authors of Project 2025, Heritage’s authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump administration.

But Homan has also been a fixture in the fever swamps of far-right media, lending the imprimatur of his resumé to white nationalist, anti-Muslim and QAnon figures. These appearances and interviews, some of which have gone unreported in the mainstream press, indicate Homan is prepared to go to extreme lengths to stem the “invasion,” as he puts it, of the country by immigrants. 

Homan didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. 

Homan served as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation branch under former President Barack Obama, helping that administration eject a record number of immigrants from the country. Then, as acting head of ICE during the first Trump administration, Homan oversaw some of its most infamous policies, including the separation of migrant children from their families. He left that role in 2018 and began a career as an anti-immigration pundit on Fox. 

But Homan has also been a frequent guest on lesser-known programs, including the “Patriot Streetfighter” podcast hosted by Scott McKay. In a recent story about McKay threatening a local judge, News Channel 5 in Nashville described his history of extremist rhetoric: 

A prominent figure in the widely mocked and discredited QAnon conspiracy movement, McKay himself has claimed that Americans are secretly living on Mars, suggested that Jared Kushner may be a clone created by the Chinese government, argued that Jews are pulling the levers of “every institution of power on Earth,” praised Adolf Hitler for “fighting the same people that we’re trying to take down today” and threatened to “put … bullets inside” medical professionals involved in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

McKay made all of those statements prior to October 2023, when Homan appeared on his livestreamed podcast. The pair spoke for about an hour, and were joined by Chris Burgard, a producer for a “two-year educational program” Homan created called “Defend the Border and Save Lives.”

In that conversation, Homan warned McKay that “what’s happening on the border” under President Joe Biden could lead to “the biggest national security failure since 9/11,” and suggested men from “countries who sponsor terrorism” were pouring into the U.S. 

McKay recounted how he and Homan had met at Mar-a-Lago during a fundraiser where Homan was screening a film. This was a possible reference to a November 2022 event at Trump’s Florida estate, which the Southern Poverty Law Center reported was organized by Homan and the United West, an Islamophobic group that says it’s devoted to stopping “the invasion of millions of illegal aliens, many of whom are HAMAS and Marxist collaborators.” 

United West and Homan collaborated on “Death County & The River Of Broken Dreams,” a documentary featuring footage of Homan at the Texas-Mexico border fearmongering about immigrants. The film was posted to YouTube in July 2023. 

Homan’s relationship with United West is alarming. The organization, listed by the SPLC an anti-Muslim hate group, is led by Tom Trento, who for over a decade has claimed that the U.S. is at war with Islam.

“I knew all my years of academic work in Islam and related areas of law enforcement and activism would be required in what will be an extended, vicious, deadly, horrible war in a clash of two incompatible civilizations, the Judeo-Christian West and Islam,” Trento wrote in 2015.

Trento also traveled with Homan to Israel last year. Together, they produced videos that were posted to Rumble, a platform that has become a haven for far-right extremists. One video shows Homan visiting the West Bank and speaking with Dany Tirza, a former Israel Defense Forces colonel who was the architect of Israel’s border walls on the West Bank and the Sinai Peninsula. Homan and Tirza discussed techniques for building border barriers. “I’m glad that we constantly trade technology on how to protect our borders,” Homan told Tirza. 

In October 2023, not long after his trip to Israel, Homan registered a new nonprofit called the Border911 Foundation to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border,” IRS filings show. The foundation promoted a policy agenda that “foreshadows Trump’s most extreme immigration proposals, which include mass deportations and deploying troops to the U.S.-Mexico border,” according to a joint investigation by five news collectives. 

While promoting Border911, Homan made appearances across far-right media. Earlier this year he appeared on “Loomer Unleashed,” a show on Rumble hosted by Laura Loomer, the extremist MAGA influencer who made headlines this fall for developing a close relationship with Trump on the campaign trail.

Loomer has advocated executing Trump’s political enemies; said a judge overseeing one of the president-elect’s criminal trials should be deported; called for the mass deportation of Muslims; referred to Black congresswomen with racial slurs; pushed the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory; and spoken in genocidal terms about Palestinians, saying Israel should “flatten” Gaza. She enjoys a friendly relationship with Nick Fuentes, the Hitler-admiring white supremacist leader of the pro-Trump “groyper” movement. 

“What is your reaction to just the failed House GOP leadership tonight and the four Republicans who voted against the measure to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas?” Loomer asked Homan, referring to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) attempt in February to impeach Biden’s Homeland Security secretary over his handling of immigrants at the southern border.

(Democrats saw the effort as less of a legitimate impeachment inquiry and more of a political stunt meant to push an extreme anti-immigrant agenda.)  

“We could’ve had him impeached tonight if it wasn’t for four Republicans,” Loomer went on. “What is your message to the obstructionist Republicans that are participating in this active infiltration and invasion of America?” 

“I think what they’ve done is a travesty,” a clearly agitated Homan said, later adding: “I’m pissed off that you got four Republican congressmen who didn’t vote to impeach this man. What is it gonna take?”

Loomer also asked Homan for his thoughts about Maher Bitar, a Palestinian American who Biden chose as Director of Intelligence. Loomer baselessly described Bitar as a “jihadist Muslim” with “terror ties.” 

“I’m shocked by what you just told me,” Homan said. “I’m gonna start putting pressure on people on the Hill to have oversight hearings. Look, how’d this guy pass vetting?” 

More recently, just weeks before Trump’s election victory, Homan made an appearance at an extremist festival where his fellow speakers included QAnon conspiracists and “church leaders wearing crowns of bullets,” per a report from Wired. 

“Trump comes back, I come back, and I will run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen,” Homan told the crowd at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in Greeley, Pennsylvania. The event was organized by the Rod of Iron Ministries, a far-right pro-Trump religious group whose members revere AR-15s and brandish them during church services. 

During his speech, according to Wired, Homan pushed a version of the Great Replacement theory, a white supremacist myth that has inspired multiple mass shootings, and claimed that Democrats were allowing immigrants into the country to sway the election for Kamala Harris. 

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the first administration in the history of this nation who unsecured a border on purpose,” Homan said. “This isn’t an accident, this isn’t incompetence, this is by design, folks. … They obviously perceive a future political advantage, thinking maybe they are future Democratic voters.” 

“These millions of people that are released into sanctuary cities across this country who will be counted in the next census, which means what?” Homan continued. “More seats in the House for the Dems. They’ll own the House forever. This is what they want. They sold this country out for future political power. And to me, that’s treasonous. There’s no other excuse for it.”

Homan is set to begin his tenure as “border czar” after Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.