MILWAUKEE — On Wednesday evening, Thomas Homan, who oversaw former President Donald Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant regime as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, stepped onto the main stage of the Republican National Convention and described immigrants as an existential threat to America.
“This isn’t mismanagement,” Homan said of President Joe Biden’s border polices. “This isn’t incompetence. This is by design. It’s a choice. This is national suicide!”
Trump recently promised to rehire Homan if he retakes the White House — something Homan described as inevitable.
“I have a message for the millions of illegal aliens who Joe Biden allowed to enter the country in violation of federal law,” Homan said. “Start packing, because you’re going home!”
The crowd roared.
Thomas Homan was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Donald Trump's first administration. Trump has promised to rehire him if he returns to the White House.
Only two years ago, Homan was invited to speak at a much smaller event: the America First Political Action Conference, a white supremacist confab organized by Nick Fuentes , the head of the deeply racist and antisemitic “groyper” movement. HuffPost first reported that Homan was scheduled to speak at the 2022 event, with Homan explaining that his assistant had arranged his appearance and that they may have confused Fuentes’ group with another right-wing group. In his telling, it was only when Homan was actually at AFPAC, sitting at a table preparing his remarks, that he decided to do a Google search for Fuentes’ name.
Google shot back article after article labeling Fuentes a white nationalist, but Homan had been skeptical — he felt he knew what it was like to unfairly be labeled a “racist.” Then he read an article about Fuentes praising Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. That was a bridge too far for Homan. He got up and left before the event began.
Afterward, HuffPost asked Homan if it concerned him that someone like Fuentes — an admirer of Adolf Hitler who marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — would want him to speak at his conference. He demurred, reiterating that he’s not racist. But a few minutes later, he called HuffPost to make a clarification. “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” he said of Fuentes and the groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know.”
Two years later, Homan is on the cusp of enacting anti-immigrant policies that would thrill Fuentes and the groypers.
“Trump comes back in January. I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said earlier this month at the National Conservatism conference. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
Homan is listed as a contributor to Project 2025, a blueprint for an authoritarian second Trump administration that was written largely by the Heritage Foundation, where he is a visiting fellow. The 900-page document calls for mass deportations of all “immigration violators” — a vision of sweeping raids and separated families.
“We are going to have a historic deportation operation, because you’ve got a historic, illegal immigration, crossing the southern border,” Homan said at the National Conservatism conference, later adding: “No one’s off the table. If you’re in the country illegally, it’s not OK. If you’re in the country illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder. ... The bottom line is: Every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It’s a crime to enter this country illegally.”
If Homan once again leads ICE, he’ll be serving under a president who has promised to deport 20 million people. Earlier this year Trump said these 20 million immigrants are “ poisoning the blood of our country .”
It was language that echoed the words of another far-right leader. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf.”
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