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Tom Homan was livid. It was 2018, not long after Jerry Brown, then California’s governor, had signed a “sanctuary state” law that walled off the jails from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It crippled the jail-to-ICE pipeline Mr. Homan helped perfect during the Obama administration when he oversaw deportation officers at ICE.
“There’s no sanctuary from federal law enforcement,” Mr. Homan, by that point the acting director of ICE under President Trump, told Fox News. In his characteristic persona of the gruff lawman, he pledged to “significantly increase our enforcement presence” in the state, adding, “California better hold on tight.”
Eight years later, Mr. Homan will get a chance to show that focusing on jails and public safety threats is the best way to meet President Trump’s demand to deport record numbers of migrants. But to do so, he will have to bring along Democrats who have loudly rejected calls to cooperate with ICE.
He was dispatched to Minneapolis by Mr. Trump last week to take over an operation from Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol commander whose aggressive tactics that swept up large numbers of noncriminals on public streets had become a liability for the administration. Among Mr. Homan’s assignments is to broker an agreement for more cooperation with local law enforcement. He has said that a deal to allow ICE into more jails in the state would allow the Department of Homeland Security to draw down their forces in Minnesota.
It will be a delicate balance; he must keep up the drumbeat for Mr. Trump’s deportation agenda while repairing relations with Democratic officials in Minnesota who have likened ICE’s actions to a federal occupation and demanded agents leave the state.
“Tom is a career professional,” said Janet Napolitano, the former homeland security secretary, who worked with Mr. Homan during the Obama administration and is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “He has the demeanor that will be required. The question, to me, is whether he will have the latitude from the White House to do what needs to be done to really de-escalate the situation in Minnesota.”
After starting his career as an upstate New York police officer, Mr. Homan spent decades in immigration enforcement, rising up to leadership roles before becoming acting ICE director during Mr. Trump’s first term.
He later became a regular on Fox News, slamming Democrats. He opened a consulting business and contributed to Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint. Now, he’s Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” reporting directly to the president.
He has been particularly critical of big-city leaders who favor “sanctuary” policies out of concern that cooperating with ICE is logistically difficult and undermines relationships with residents.
“Tom Homan is an American patriot and career law enforcement officer with decades of experience effectively protecting American communities and deporting criminal illegal aliens,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman. “Any left-wing agitator or criminal illegal alien who thinks Tom’s presence is a victory for their cause is sadly mistaken.”
The White House did not make Mr. Homan available for an interview.
One homeland security official, discussing internal matters on the condition of anonymity, said that immigration operations on the ground had already turned to focus on criminal and public safety threats, much as Mr. Homan outlined in a news conference last week. Under Mr. Bovino, immigration authorities were known for conducting random sweeps, such as raids at Home Depot parking lots.
The official said that border agents were now integrating with ICE as part of the same team and would not be operating independently. A Trump administration official said that Mr. Homan was streamlining the operation in Minnesota and had made a central chain of command.
Some Minnesota county jails openly cooperate with federal authorities. At least one, Hennepin, which includes Minneapolis, refrains from assisting ICE agents as a matter of policy. But state officials have emphasized that the Department of Corrections, which runs the state’s prisons, transfers people to ICE once they have finished serving their sentences.
“We do cooperate with this federal administration and with previous federal administrations on keeping people safe in our city,” Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’s Democratic mayor, told The New York Times last week. He added, “But why does this have to be about immigration? Why does it have to be about whether a person has brown-colored skin or not?”
Some familiar with Mr. Homan’s record express skepticism that he can build trust on the ground, where immigration agents have swept up refugees and immigrants without criminal records, and clashed with protesters, and in recent weeks, shooting and killed two U.S. citizens.
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Tom Homan, the border czar, at a news conference last week. After starting his career as a New York police officer, Mr. Homan spent decades in immigration enforcement, rising up to leadership roles.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
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