14 July 31st -Aug 6th, 2025 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | 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 toler- ance” 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 immi- grant 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 reli- gious 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 unneces- sary 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 “preg- nant 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 perpet- uated 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 incar- ceration 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. The Pull of the Dark Side from p 12
