WASHINGTON— Tom Homan , a pugnacious cop who will serve as President-elect Donald Trump ’s border czar, has taken up a surprising mantle for a longtime immigration hard-liner: the realist in the room.
Homan, who served as the acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first term and helped design his family-separations policy , has spent the weeks following the election right-sizing Trump’s sweeping campaign promise to arrest and deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally.
In private transition meetings and occasionally in public, he has emphasized that immigrants with criminal records should be the primary targets for arrest—a narrower set of people than the 15 million to 20 million Trump had pledged to go after. Homan also has said the administration wouldn’t carry out intimidating sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods and that—given the government’s limited number of agents, detention space and planes—he is unsure how extensive the actual deportation campaign will be.

Migrants who requested asylum through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection CBP One application queue at the premises of the Mexico’s National Institute of Migration (INM) to secure safe passage to the northern border with the U.S. before president-elect Donald Trump takes office, in Tapachula, Mexico January 6, 2025. REUTERS/Damian Sanchez
“I keep getting asked the question: How many people are we going to remove in the first 100 days? I don’t know,” Homan said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t know what resources I’m going to have, what Congress is going to give me for funding.”
Homan’s allies say he brings the exact sort of resume Trump wants for a top job orchestrating a broad governmentwide undertaking. He has spent four decades in the government as a Border Patrol agent and federal investigator pursuing migrant smugglers and trafficking rings.
“I’ve worked for six different presidents,” Homan said. “I’ve seen hundreds of policies come and go. I’ve seen what policies worked and what policies don’t work.”

Tom Homan, President-elect Donald Trump’s appointee for “border czar”, speaks ahead of a visit by Trump during the AmericaFest 2024 conference sponsored by conservative group Turning Point USA in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 22, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr
Just as important to Trump: He looks and sounds the part. Homan has learned to intertwine his realism with the kind of tough talk that Trump’s supporters expect. In 2017, Trump described his then-ICE director’s appearance as “very nasty” and “very mean.” (“That’s what I’m looking for!” he joked to an audience of police officers at the time.)
John Torres, a former acting ICE director who is close to Homan, said people question his abilities because “he talks like a street cop thug.”
“I think they can underestimate his intelligence,” Torres said. “He’s a really smart, capable guy.”
Homan, whose border-czar position won’t require Senate confirmation, has been one of the most outspoken incoming administration officials during the transition, even as top advisers and cabinet nominees have kept a low public profile. He has become a fixture on Fox News and in other conservative media, blasting the Biden administration’s border policies, outlining the president’s agenda—and at times issuing threats.
“My gang’s bigger than your gang, and we’re gonna take you out,” he said in a recent podcast interview with Donald Trump Jr., addressing alleged gang members. He has said immigrants “should feel afraid” and promised to use “shock and awe” to carry out his plans.
He has also echoed Trump’s inaccurate comments connecting Biden’s immigration policies to the consecutive attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas—both of which were carried out by U.S. citizens. “This country’s in great danger, we need to secure that border,” he said on Fox News.
Rep. Jim Jordan, (R., Ohio), who is expected to be a top Republican voice on immigration policy in Congress and is close to Trump, said Homan “represents the attitude that the American people voted for.”
Becoming the face of Trump’s signature campaign promise comes with risks, and there might be no way to win. Homan’s suggestions of what’s possible already has drawn the ire of some Trump allies, who say he is watering down one of Trump’s core agenda items before the president-elect even takes office. Homan also could become an administration scapegoat should public opinion sour on the deportation effort.
Homan has spent the weeks since the election crisscrossing the country to meet with local officials who might assist and private contractors who could offer up new detention spaces. The scope of the deportation effort will depend on cooperation from Democratic-led cities, where immigrants living in the U.S. illegally are concentrated.
He has been pushing city mayors to work with the incoming administration. One of the most common ways ICE makes arrests is by picking people up as they are released from jail, even on a minor violation. But blue states have broadly barred local authorities from coordinating with ICE.
“The sanctuary policies are gonna result in exactly what they don’t want, more officers in the neighborhood and more arrests or collateral,” he said in the Journal interview. “But if that’s the game they want to play, I’ll play that game.”
Homan started his career as a police officer in upstate New York before joining the Border Patrol in 1984 and moving up the ranks as a federal agent in Phoenix and Dallas. He was one of the officials selected in 2003 to set up ICE, a new government agency created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
That same year, Homan witnessed an event that he and close allies say irrevocably changed his worldview on immigration.
A smuggler had crammed more than 70 migrants into the back of a tractor-trailer, where it grew so hot that the people inside attempted to scratch a hole in the floor for fresh air. When the truck was discovered, 17 people inside had died, including a father and his five-year-old son still sitting on his lap. Homan, who had been called to the scene, had a boy about the same age, he recalls in his 2020 book, “Defend the Border and Save Lives.”

Veronica and her son Nicolas, 5, walk after attempting to cross the border and U.S. authorities prevented them from crossing, as rumours spread that they would be allowed to enter the United States, according to local media, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico December 18, 2024. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

A drone view shows asylum-seeking migrants from Colombia, Peru and Panama as they walk along the border wall after crossing the border into the U.S., in Jacumba Hot Springs, California, U.S., as seen from Mexico, May 16, 2024. REUTERS/Adrees Latif
“Every time I glanced at the child, an overwhelming sense of anxiety came over me—not only because of the horrific scene, but because he so reminded me of my own son,” he wrote.
The incident hardened his view that the journey to the U.S. wasn’t worth the toll of human suffering, and the best way to prevent that suffering was by deterring the migrants from coming at all. A decade later, during the Obama years, Homan proposed to prosecute migrants who cross the border illegally so they are sent to jail and separated from their children. Though his suggestion was rejected by top Obama officials, Homan and others around him recall, he helped carry it out during Trump’s first term—before the public backlash became too great.
“I worked with him well,” said Gil Kerlikowske , the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under President Barack Obama . “I never heard kind of the language that’s being floated about.”
Former colleagues say Homan was much more nuanced—and in some cases even sensitive—than his current tough-guy persona would suggest. One official who worked with Homan under Obama and Trump recalled during the first surge of migrant families at the border in 2014, Homan commented that, were he a parent living in Central America, he likely would have made the same choice to migrate with his family.
Homan’s anti-immigration stances further developed when Trump was elected in 2016, in part on a promise to seal the border.
“I’ve evolved over the years because of tragedies I’ve seen,” Homan said . “Open borders are inhumane. Secure borders save lives.”
Write to Michelle Hackman at michelle.hackman@wsj.com and Tarini Parti at tarini.parti@wsj.com