In an exclusive interview in Washington, D.C., with The Alex Marlow Show podcast, President Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan discussed his decision to join the administration’s efforts to secure the southern border.
Speaking with Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow, Homan described in detail what he characterized as the human and social costs of policies promoting mass immigration.
Homan began his career with the U.S. Border Patrol in 1984 and later became the first Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director to have risen through the ranks of the Department of Homeland Security. Over the course of his decades-long career, he has been a leading advocate for stronger border enforcement and immigration control.
Homan served under six presidents, beginning with Ronald Reagan, and was long regarded as a nonpartisan figure within both Democratic and Republican administrations, Breitbart reported.
Since returning to government service under President Trump, Homan has become one of the most frequently targeted officials in the administration, drawing sharp criticism from opponents of the administration’s immigration policies.
When asked about the threats and attacks against him on a daily basis, Homan told Marlow: “I don’t care.”
“I mean, this is the second time I came out of retirement for the president. It’s hard to say no to the president of the United States and help him fix something where thousands of lives have been lost,” Homan said. “So I knew the hate was coming. And, you know, unfortunately, my family pays the price. I haven’t lived with my family in months because of the death threats against me. But my family understands the important mission.”
In a reflective moment during the interview, Homan said his critics would better understand his commitment to border security if they had experienced what he has over the past three and a half decades.
He added that his long career in immigration enforcement has strengthened his resolve to protect the nation’s borders, a mission he described as both deeply personal and highly effective.
“If they held the dead children I’ve held, talked to little girls as young as 9 who were raped multiple times by handlers from the cartel, standing on the back of a tractor-trailer when 19 people are at your feet because they baked to death, including a 5-year-old boy…running operation in Arizona where alien smuggling cartels are ripping bodies from each other with drugs, and when someone couldn’t pay their smuggling fees, they’d torture them and call their relatives and let them listen while they torture them and kill them because they couldn’t pay the fees. These are just a few things,” Homan said.
“If you wore my shoes for three and a half decade, you wouldn’t ask that question because I’ve seen so much tragedy in my life, it’s who I am today,” he added. “So when I’m getting asked to come back and secure the border and you know it’s going to save lives, how do you say no to that?”
Homan became emotional as he recounted the stories of a five-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl he encountered during his career. He said their experiences and the suffering they endured had a lasting impact on him.
“The two that break my heart is the 19 dead aliens in the back of a tractor-trailer. When I arrived on that crime scene, when I got to the back of that tractor-trailer, there were several bodies that already hit the ground and when the doors finally opened, people rushed out to get air and some of the dead bodies, that were fighting for a small hole where the break light used to be to breath, were pushed out,” Homan detailed.
“When I looked back in there, I saw a little boy in his underwear, turned out to be five years old, dead. With … his father who was cradling him on top of him. Most of them, if not all of them, were in their underwear because they were trying to get some relief from the serious heat in that steel box,” he said.