The White House border czar who President Donald Trump is dispatching to Minneapolis following the fatal shooting of two US residents is a longtime regulation enforcement official who has pushed for a few of the Trump administration’s controversial immigration-related insurance policies.
Trump said Monday he was sending Tom Homan to Minnesota following Saturday’s deadly taking pictures of Minneapolis ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal brokers. The incident has infected tensions and drawn bipartisan criticism of the Trump administration’s portrayal — with out proof — of Pretti as somebody who sought to commit an act of domestic terrorism and needed to bloodbath regulation enforcement. Federal officers have to this point declined to present to the public vital particulars substantiating their declare an agent shot Pretti in self-defense.
The transfer to ship Homan to Minnesota was met with some aid by Republican lawmakers and Homeland Security officers as the 64-year-old border czar has a long time price of regulation enforcement expertise, starting his profession as a police officer in New York earlier than turning into a Border Patrol agent in California in 1984. Homan additionally led Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation efforts throughout the Obama administration.
As performing director of ICE throughout Trump’s first time period, Homan served as the public face and vocal defender of a few of the administration’s most contentious immigration insurance policies, together with the separation of kids and households who crossed the border.
He mentioned at a public occasion in September 2017 that his company would arrest undocumented individuals who got here ahead to look after the youngsters, which earlier administrations had prevented. He has additionally virulently opposed “sanctuary city” insurance policies that limit native regulation enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration efforts.
But the president sending Homan to Minnesota additionally suggests a possible sidelining of the extra heavy-handed ways utilized by prime Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino and underscores the ongoing inside dispute inside the administration over how they’re finishing up the president’s immigration agenda.
While Bovino’s enforcement model has been backed by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Homan has usually taken a extra stringent method to immigration enforcement — wanting to give attention to public security and nationwide safety threats. That is barely totally different from the broad sweeps which were occurring in cities nationwide throughout Trump’s second time period.
While Trump was campaigning in 2024, Homan mentioned in an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that the president’s large deportation marketing campaign would contain focused arrests.
“It’s not gonna be – a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” Homan, who was additionally a contributor to Project 2025, mentioned at the time.
But as the Department of Homeland Security has lagged behind inside quotas for immigrant arrests, the company had broadened its focus to embrace generalized sweeps and stops in immigrant-heavy communities. The company has asserted sweeping regulation enforcement powers in ways in which haven’t been tried by earlier regulation enforcement companies — together with in an inside memo that mentioned ICE officers don’t want judicial warrants to search an individual’s residence. Experts have told NCS that this directive disregards basic guardrails which can be enshrined in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
While Homan has publicly been in step with the Trump administration, there was infighting between factions who again him and those that again Noem. Homan and Noem have usually not spoken to one another in current months, in accordance to US officers.
At a press briefing on Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned Homan will now be the “main point of contact on the ground in Minneapolis” whereas Bovino will “continue to lead” Border Patrol nationwide. She additionally tamped down any look of battle between Noem and Homan.
“Secretary Noem is also in charge of FEMA and we’re in the wake of a brutal winter storm where hundreds of thousands of Americans have been impacted by that. Border czar Homan is in a unique position to drop everything and go to Minnesota to continue having productive conversations with state and local officials,” Leavitt mentioned.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune praised Trump’s resolution to have Homan oversee immigration operations in Minnesota, calling it a “positive development” that might lead “to turning down the temperature and restoring order in Minnesota.”
“He knows what he’s doing. He’s gets it,” one Republican lawmaker additionally advised NCS, saying that Homan understood the system and the way to do enforcement operations the “correct way.” Allies and advisers additionally view him as being “a grown up,” one supply mentioned.
Homan has come beneath some scrutiny since taking up his present position. The New York Times reported in September that Homan was recorded in 2024 accepting a bag that contained $50,000 in money by undercover FBI brokers in an investigation the Trump Justice Department later closed.
An individual conversant in the operation had told NCS that Homan accepted the money as a part of a sting operation, and that Homan was being investigated for potential bribery and different crimes after he agreed to assist the undercover brokers safe authorities contracts. Homan, in the meantime, has mentioned he didn’t “take $50,000 from anybody.”
The Department of Justice shut down the investigation after Trump started his second time period final yr over doubts prosecutors may show Homan had agreed to a selected act in change for the money and since he was not in a authorities place at the time. The White House later known as the investigation into Homan “blatantly political.”
NCS’s Kaitlan Collins and Isabelle D’Antonio contributed.