Tom Homan once spared Phoenix migrants. Now he’s Trump’s Darth Vader

Standing in front of a joint session of the Arizona Legislature in April, Tom Homan played the hits.

During a nearly 30-minute address punctuated with occasional profanity, Donald Trump’s so-called border czar spouted the same crude bluster, defiance and dime-store machismo that have become the hallmarks of his public appearances. He boasted about being entrusted to lead “the largest deportation operation in this country’s history.” He told undocumented immigrants they should be “looking over your shoulder.” When Democrats filed out of the room at the beginning of his speech — carrying sheets of paper with the names of people they said were “disappeared” by the Trump administration — Homan beamed with bravado.

“Thank you for making my day,” Homan told them with a smile as they filed out. “I love haters. They make my day, every day.”

In the second Trump administration, Homan seems to be enjoying all the attention that helming a cruel and chaotic mass deportation scheme has afforded him. The 63-year-old — that’s a year younger than George Clooney, though Homan appears a million city miles older — has become a mainstay of conservative media. He threatens to arrest Democratic lawmakers who oppose the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents whom he’s let off the leash. He gloats over the abduction and removal of non-criminal migrants to foreign gulags. He peddles bullshit about the doxing of ICE agents to justify hiding their identities. Ironically, considering how much his agents conceal their faces, Homan’s love of the MAGA spotlight has made his craggy visage one of the most recognizable among Trump’s cronies.

Homan wasn’t always like this, though. Trump’s deportation attack dog has spent decades in immigration enforcement, many of them in Phoenix. He has worked under Republican and Democratic presidents, dutifully enacting the immigration agendas of both, even when they weren’t drippingly inhumane. In fact, according to both former colleagues and court documents, Homan was once something too few in Trump’s orbit are these days — reasonable.

Phoenix New Times spoke to several former colleagues of Homan who knew him while he served as the executive assistant director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations under Barack Obama. They spoke to New Times on condition of anonymity, citing Homan’s and the Trump administration’s power and penchant for deploying the might of the federal government in retaliation against critics.

They believe Homan was a different man then — a man who abhorred Donald Trump and didn’t believe that every undocumented immigrant represented a mortal threat to the country. He even intervened on behalf of immigrants arrested by notorious former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, they say, saving hundreds of them from deportation. The accounts of these former colleagues find support both in court records and in Homan’s own statements before Congress and elsewhere.

And they wonder what changed. Is Homan simply a hack, a hypocritical apparatchik of the Trump era for whom conscience and morality are as malleable as Mister Fantastic? Did his worldview fundamentally change after leaving Obama’s employ?

Or has Homan finally found his Emperor Palpatine in Trump, so seduced by the power of the MAGA dark side that he’s willing to justify any act?

‘Prosecutorial discretion’

By his own admission, Homan’s ties to Phoenix run deep. As such, he’s left a trail of decisions here that belie his hard-ass persona.

After starting in law enforcement as a cop in his New York hometown of West Carthage, Homan joined the Border Patrol in 1984. Initially assigned to the San Diego sector, he worked his way up to conducting investigations as a special agent for what was then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In his 2020 book, “Defend the Border and Save Lives,” Homan wrote that he spent “a major portion of my time as a special agent investigating and prosecuting alien smuggling and human trafficking organizations in Phoenix.” When Congress folded INS into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, Homan rose to the position of supervisor, directing investigative agents within ICE.

In early 2013, after nearly three decades in immigration enforcement, Homan got the call from Obama to lead ERO, the arm of ICE responsible for arresting and removing people who don’t have legal authority to be in the country. Though the Obama administration did plenty of that — earning Obama the sobriquet “Deporter-in-Chief — those who knew Homan at the time said he did not strike them as an anti-immigrant zealot.

Homan was a valued colleague, they said — enforcement-minded but compassionate, someone who embraced common sense when it came to immigration issues. “I considered him to be thoughtful,” one said. “I considered him to want to do the right thing and what was best for Arizona.” Though many right-wingers in the state disagreed, the best thing for Arizona wasn’t snatching up and deporting every otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrant ICE could lay its hands on.

The official policy of the federal government at the time was outlined in two 2011 memos from then-ICE director John Morton. ICE would exercise “prosecutorial discretion,” Morton wrote, considering factors such as a person’s criminal history or whether someone “poses a national security or public safety concern” when deciding whether or not to question, detain or remove an immigrant. Aliens suspected of terrorism or espionage were at the top of Morton’s removal list. Next were so-called “criminal aliens,” with those convicted of “aggravated felonies” prioritized for removal over those with misdemeanors.

Though Homan now says any immigrant is fair game — “If you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table,” he told Arizona lawmakers — his past associates said he wholeheartedly supported using prosecutorial discretion. “I don’t know if he had a soft heart so much as I think he accepted the philosophy in the Obama administration,” one colleague said, “which was that if you can only deport 400,000 people, you go for the 400,000 worst, which is only a very small percentage of what you encounter.”

That certainly isn’t ICE’s modus operandi these days. Homan and others have claimed that the administration is targeting the worst of the worst, but there’s vast evidence to the contrary. One estimate found that nearly 72% of those detained by immigration authorities since Trump took office have never been convicted of a crime. Speaking at the Arizona Legislature, Homan blamed the detention of so many “collaterals” on so-called “sanctuary cities,” though the steady stream of stories about otherwise innocent people snapped up by ICE — some undocumented, some with protected status and even some U.S. citizens — suggests that “collaterals” haven’t been really collateral at all.

Homan once vigorously defended the discretionary enforcement policy at which he now sneers. During 2013 testimony before a congressional subcommittee, Homan called prosecutorial discretion “smart and effective enforcement.” ICE had removed 410,000 people in 2012, he noted, most of whom met the agency’s “enforcement priorities.” Fifty-five percent were “criminal aliens” — a rate the current administration isn’t even within shouting distance of reaching — while most of the rest had orders of removal or had recently and illegally crossed the border. Such “successes” could not have been achieved, he added, without the policies issued by Morton and then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

What’s more, Homan’s ERO division played a role in reigning in one of Trump’s biggest immigration allies, a man Homan warmly praised during his speech to the Arizona Legislature earlier this year:

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Cutting ‘illegals’ a break

Arpaio was a problem for the Obama administration.

For years, the swaggering Arizona sheriff had earned the ire of Democrats and progressive activists for turning his agency into a mini ICE, terrorizing local immigrants with large-scale sweeps of Latino neighborhoods and worksite raids. ICE and Arpaio initially worked hand in hand — through the 287(g) program, 160 sheriff’s deputies were cross-deputized as ICE agents in the early 2000s. But by the time Homan became top dog at ERO in 2013, the Obama administration was slowly boxing Arpaio in.

In 2009, DHS stripped Arpaio’s deputies of the power to enforce federal immigration law, though that hardly slowed them. Two years later, the Justice Department issued a 22-page report accusing the sheriff’s office of biased policing toward Latinos, eventually suing Arpaio for the same reasons. Civil rights groups also took Arpaio to court. As a result, a federal judge eventually found the sheriff’s office guilty of widespread racial profiling, imposing independent monitoring of the agency that continues to this day.

Despite that, ICE had still been detaining and deporting immigrants Arpaio had caught in his illegal dragnets. At the time, immigrants were subject to a sinister scheme in which ICE lawyers trained Maricopa County prosecutors on how to make sure the poor saps collared in Arpaio’s employment raids were deported. Under anti-immigrant stalwart county prosecutor Andrew Thomas (who was disbarred in 2012 for prosecutorial misconduct) and his successor Bill Montgomery (now an Arizona Supreme Court justice), prosecutors hit undocumented workers with Class 4 felonies for ID theft for using fake IDs to obtain work. That made them non-bondable under voter-approved Proposition 100, which denied bail to undocumented immigrants accused of certain crimes.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2014 struck down Prop 100 as unconstitutional, but not before county prosecutors foisted a Hobson’s choice upon Arpaio’s arrestees: plead guilty to a lesser charge involving criminal impersonation, or remain in jail and fight a losing battle. The catch: The lesser charge would ensure their deportation, and a 10-year bar from reentry, because ICE considered it a “Crime Involving Moral Turpitude.”

According to Homan’s former colleagues, he eventually came around to the position that the cases were tainted due to the racial profiling accusations against Arpaio. Ultimately, these associates believe, Homan’s legal advisors convinced him that if Arpaio’s raids and arrests proved to be unconstitutional and racially motivated, then ICE should not use those convictions to remove those he arrested from the country.

“That pipeline of people being arrested by the sheriff and prosecuted by MCAO and then going over to ICE was shut down,” one associate said. “Their (immigration) cases were dismissed without prejudice.”

New Times was unable to reach Homan through ICE, the White House or even his publicist. Given the reluctance of those in the know to go on the record, verifying that Homan intervened to assist hundreds of criminal aliens in avoiding deportation might seem a tall order. That is, were it not for a lawsuit brought in 2014 by a high-ranking ICE attorney against then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Homan’s boss at the time.

The lawsuit was brought by Pat Vroom, then the chief counsel for ICE in Arizona. She’d enjoyed a stellar, 30-year career as a government attorney until internal politics at the agency got the better of her. Her complaint dealt mainly with alleged age and sex discrimination — in 2015, the government paid her nearly $400,000 to end the suit — but part of the suit dealt with the “Arizona Identity Theft Initiative.” Vroom was tasked with reviewing the immigration files of hundreds of detainees who had been convicted of “low-level” identity theft under Arizona law.

Specifically, Vroom was told to “look carefully” at the cases and consider them for “administrative closure,” a form of dismissal that would allow the individual to be released from ICE custody. According to the suit, Vroom’s superiors explained to her that “the typical alien defendant convicted under these provisions of Arizona criminal law had simply been using fake ID to get and keep employment.” Working with ICE’s local official in charge of removals, Vroom reviewed 480 cases in 2013, weighing the history of each case, the arresting agency, whether “the false identity belonged to a real person,” and, if so, if that real person had “suffered any permanent loss” as a result.

In other words, prosecutorial discretion. ICE wouldn’t waste time on low-level offenders just trying to work when there were more serious criminals to target. In May 2014, according to her complaint, both Vroom and her local ERO counterpart received awards from the State Bar of Arizona “for their joint implementation of former ICE Director John Morton’s Prosecutorial Discretion Initiatives.”

Homan was not a party to Vroom’s suit, nor does his name appear in it. But Homan’s ex-colleagues say it is “impossible” that he was unaware of ICE's Arizona Identity Theft Initiative. Vroom’s orders were coming from ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C., from the highest echelons of the agency. Homan’s man in charge of removals in Arizona was working in tandem with Vroom. If Homan had any issues with it at the time, he doesn’t seem to have vocalized them.

Speaking to the Arizona Legislature a decade later, Homan’s tune had changed. He blasted Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security Secretary under Joe Biden, for supposedly telling ICE agents that “you can’t arrest someone for being here illegally unless he is convicted of a serious offense.” Never mind that such a directive is a clear example of the same prosecutorial discretion that Homan had employed and defended years earlier.

Now, empowered by Trump to be as cruel as he wanted to be, the mere idea of it struck Homan as “borderline treasonous.”

Hulk Homan

In 2015, Barack Obama bestowed upon Homan the Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service, the highest honor a federal civil service employee can receive. Homan announced his retirement the following year, holding his official retirement party just days after Trump was inaugurated for the first time in 2017. At that point, the idea that Homan would cozy up to Trump struck his former colleagues as unlikely.

In his 2020 book, Homan wrote that he was “amazed and surprised” by Trump’s win and “happy for the men and women of ICE” who would now be able to do their jobs “without ridiculous policies that limited their abilities.” But privately, former colleagues said, Homan was aghast at Trump’s victory, or at least allowed them to believe as much. In no uncertain words, they remember, he told them that he thought Trump would destroy the country.

That’s not the way Homan tells it in his book or on the stump. In his book, Homan recounts how Trump’s pick to lead DHS called him during his retirement party, relaying Trump’s request that he postpone his retirement and become the next director of ICE — “a two-step promotion,” Homan noted. He took the gig, serving as acting ICE director until June 2018, when he resigned again due to “family and personal considerations.”

In those two years, the meaner, crueler version of Homan took shape for public consumption. As acting ICE director, he was closely associated with Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting and removing anyone entering the country illegally, including immigrant parents who had brought their children with them. In 2022, The Atlantic called Homan the “intellectual father” of the policy of separating immigrant children from their parents as a means of deterring illegal entries. Both the Obama administration and Trump’s first DHS secretary rejected that policy as inhumane. But it found purchase under Trump’s second pick to head DHS, Kirstjen Nielsen.

In May 2018, with family separations in full swing, a grimacing Homan attended a press conference in San Diego with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to formally announce the initiative. But zero tolerance — the polar opposite of the prosecutorial discretion that Homan once championed — soon proved to be a public relations nightmare for the Trump White House. Even Republicans and conservative religious leaders joined in its condemnation. Trump officially ended the practice via executive order in June 2018.

Homan still defends the program, which led to the separation of more than 5,500 children from their parents, according to one estimate. During an October 2024 interview with “60 Minutes,” Homan blamed any hardship experienced by the children on their parents for entering the country illegally to begin with. Asked if there was a way to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plans without family separation, Homan didn’t blink. “Of course there is,” he said. “Families can be deported together.”

It wasn't Homan's only bout of unnecessary cruelty as Trump's ICE man. As New Times previously reported, in Dec. 2017, Homan reversed an ICE policy of presumptively releasing pregnant women who had been arrested for immigration violations. Under Obama, Homan had authored a memo promising that "pregnant women will generally not be detained by ICE." But under Trump, an illegal is an illegal, pregnant or not.

Having stepped down as ICE honcho, Homan burnished his right-wing bona fides on Fox News, defending Trump and later denouncing Biden. He founded the non-profit group Border 911, which perpetuated the false trope that the U.S. was being “invaded” by immigrants. He headed up another, The America Project, devoted to funding election denialism. (For the latter, according to its 2023 tax return, Homan received a salary of $110,769.)

Homan also started his own consulting firm, Homeland Strategic Consulting, which earned nearly $84,000 in fees during the 2021-22 campaign cycle, according to the non-profit group opensecrets.org, most of it from the failed U.S. Senate candidacy of Arizona Republican Jim Lamon. And Homan reportedly contributed to Project 2025, the uber-conservative Heritage Foundation’s massive blueprint for the second Trump administration.

In his new role as Trump’s border czar, Homan has defended and rationalized everything from ICE agents masking themselves to the detention of immigrants — criminal and non-criminal alike — in cruel hellholes like Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center and El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.

Is this the same Homan who once preached prosecutorial discretion and blessed the release of low-level criminal aliens from ICE custody?

One former colleague said Homan seemed to be a “positive influence” when he worked for Obama. She now believes he was simply an opportunist, someone who “sniffs out power” and follows it wherever it goes. If she could ask Homan a question today, it would be “What the fuck are you doing?”

“He seemed genuine,” said another colleague. “But when he started working for Trump the first go round, I was just like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

A third colleague said she saw Homan in the same vein as Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and Lindsey Graham, formerly centrist Republican politicians “who are on record as having described the things that they now support as being abominations.” She pointed to Homan’s recent appearance at a Turning Point USA event in Florida. Homan challenged a heckler to square off after his speech. “I guarantee you he sits down to pee,” Homan said, to the delight of the crowd.

The former associate had never seen that version of Homan in person. It was a caricature of himself — “Hulk Homan,” she said with a sigh.

Recent evolution or not, Hulk Homan figures to hang around. ICE just got a $75 billion budget infusion from Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” promising to make Trump’s dark mass deportation dreams a reality with an exponential boost in funding. That means more third-world-style arrests of grandmas and taco vendors, more incarceration spectacles like Alligator Alcatraz and more deportation flights to countries like South Sudan, El Salvador and the tiny African nation of Eswatini.

It means job security for anyone willing to cast aside previous beliefs and zealously enact Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. The lure of power, status and attention on Homan seems clear to his former colleagues. One former Homan colleague thought of Lord Acton’s famous dictum — that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely — before offering her own take.

“I think power reveals,” she said, “and I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.”

This story is part of the Arizona Watchdog Project, a yearlong reporting effort led by New Times and supported by the Trace Foundation, in partnership with Deep South Today.