S tanding 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, defi- ance and dime-store machismo that have become the hallmarks of his public appear- ances. He boasted about being entrusted to lead “the largest deportation operation in this country’s history.” He told undocu- mented 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 “disap- peared” 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 atten- tion 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 identi- ties. 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 govern- ment 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 deporta- tion. 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 appa- ratchik of the Trump era for whom conscience and morality are as malleable as Mister Fantastic? Did his worldview funda- mentally 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 investi- gating 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 posi- tion 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 Enforcement and Removal Operations, the arm of ICE responsible for arresting and removing people who don’t have legal authority to be in the country. Though the Obama adminis- tration 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 govern- ment 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 ille- gally, 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 THE PULL OF THE DARK SIDE >> p 12 BY STEPHEN LEMONS Tom Homan once spared Phoenix migrants from deportation. Now he’s Trump’s Darth Vader. Those who knew Tom Homan at the time say he was aghast that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, telling them Trump would destroy the country. (Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images)
