U.S. Customs and Border Protection / Flickr
CV NEWS FEED // President-elect Donald Trump on Monday announced that he is selecting Tom Homan, a Catholic who brings a humanitarian approach to immigration policy, to be his “border czar.”
Homan served in Trump’s first administration as the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Homan held the position from January 2017 to June 2018.
Homan had previously served in the Obama administration’s DHS, and before that was a Border Patrol agent and police officer in his home state of New York.
A longtime advocate for border security and enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, Homan explained how his Catholic faith informed his views in his 2020 book “Defend the Border and Save Lives: Solving Our Most Important Humanitarian and Security Crisis.”
In May 2020, Homan appeared as a guest on the podcast “The Catholic Current” in an episode titled “Life as a Catholic Border Patrol Agent” in which he discussed his career and book.
“I’m not a politician, I’m a career law enforcement officer,” Homan told host Fr. Robert McTeigue, SJ. “I carried a badge and a gun for 34 years, defending the communities that I lived in and defending the country.”
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“People need to understand, I’m a law enforcement officer,” he said. “I enforce law. I didn’t make it up. I enforce laws that were enacted by Congress and signed by the president of the United States.”
“I was raised in a Catholic family in Upstate New York and I’ve seen a lot of terrible things in my career,” he told McTeigue. “Securing the border not only saves lives in this country. It saves lives of the most vulnerable people that are enticed to come to this country with promises that can’t be kept.”
“I’ve seen many children who died making that journey,” he noted:
Thirty-one percent of women are being sexually assaulted making that journey. Criminal cartels are making millions of dollars a week smuggling people, trafficking in people. Opioids killed almost 70,000 Americans in the past year – that are coming across that border. So, it’s important having a secure border.
“People are dying and Congress has refused to address the problem at the border,” Homan emphasized in the 2020 interview. “Congress has ignored this issue for 30 years.”
Homan clarified to McTeigue that he is not anti-immigration, but is opposed to illegal immigration on humanitarian grounds. “Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime,” he said.
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He stated that he supports aiding Central American countries where many illegal migrants are from: “Let’s help them to succeed in their country so they don’t have to leave their homeland, they don’t have to put themselves in the hand of a criminal cartel.”
“But if they want to come to the United States let’s fix the immigration system so they can come legally,” he stressed.
Soon after Trump’s announcement that Homan would join his second administration, a clip of the incoming border czar testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee in 2019 went viral.
In the clip, Homan, then the acting director of ICE under the first Trump administration, was responding to left-wing Rep. Chuy Garcia, D-IL, who had asked him: “Have you ever held a deceased child in your arms?”
“Your comments are disgusting,” Homan replied:
I served my country for 34 years, and yes, I held a five-year-old boy in my arms.
…
I knelt down beside him and said a prayer for him. Because I knew what the last 30 minutes of his life were like.
“And I had a five-year-old son at the time,” Homan added. “What I’ve been trying to do my 34 years serving my nation is to save lives.”
“So, for you to sit there and insult my integrity and my love for my country and for children,” Homan said, “that’s why this whole thing needs to be fixed.”
In questioning Homan, Garcia had advanced a debunked Democratic narrative, advanced by multiple corporate media sources, that the Trump administration initiated the separation of migrant children from their detained parents.
The policy actually began under the Clinton administration and continued under the Bush and Obama administrations.
In 2018, Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation noted that, in fact, Trump had signed an executive order that year “directing that families who enter the country illegally be kept together ‘to the extent permitted by law.’”
