While Musk is furiously slashing the rest of government, he’s helping hire more ICE agents, border czar Tom Homan told NR.
Oxon Hill, Md. — The Department Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) cost-cutting efforts have roiled Washington in recent weeks, but according to President’s Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, Elon Musk is committed to growing, rather than shrinking, at least one part of the federal government: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“I talked to Elon Musk yesterday, he’s trying to help us hire more agents,” Homan told National Review in a wide-ranging interview on Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Oxon Hill, Md. “I’ve actually talked to him about how to create efficiencies in the recruiting process and the onboarding process,” he said, adding that sometimes it takes months to onboard ICE officers once they are hired.
The Musk-Homan mission to shake up immigration enforcement hiring efforts comes as the Trump administration continues to make headway in securing the U.S.-Mexico border after a Democratic administration that saw record illegal border crossings. Four weeks into Trump’s second term, crossing are already down a jaw-dropping 94 percent compared with the same period last year under the Biden administration, according to the federal government’s latest numbers.
To Trump’s border czar, that 94 percent figure represents “unprecedented success.” But he says there’s far more work to be done in cracking down on drug cartels, arresting violent illegal aliens, and helping Trump fulfill his 2024 campaign pledge to carry out the largest mass deportation effort of illegal immigrants in American history.
“I’m not happy,” with the number of arrests ICE has carried out thus far, says Homan, who has pledged to prioritize violent criminals in his deportation efforts. “Let me rephrase: I’m happy that we got the arrest we have, but I want more,” he said, adding that there are a lot of criminal aliens who are still walking the streets “and we need to find them.”
Serving as a top immigration under Barack Obama and then as ICE director under Trump until his retirement in 2018, he’s now known as the father of the controversial child family separation policy that is loathed by the Left. A no-nonsense former cop with a gruff demeanor, he looks the part, Trump has joked. The president praised him in 2017 as someone who “looks very nasty” and “very mean.”
The high-ranking border patrol official has become a celebrity of sorts among immigration hawks and grassroots Republicans who see the Trump administration’s border crackdown as yeoman’s work. En route to a Newsmax interview midday Saturday, Homan’s security detail struggled to shepherd Homan through a horde of CPAC attendees eager to shake hands and snap a photo with the man tasked with carrying out Trump’s mass deportation effort. After cracking open a can of Coke at the start of our interview roughly 30 minutes later, Homan joked to NR he felt bad he couldn’t accommodate every selfie request given his strict schedule.
Homan’s deportation efforts are inherently limited by resource constraints. Quite a lot will depend on how much Congress appropriates for in this year’s reconciliation legislation for more immigration enforcement resources, including immigration law enforcement officers, air and ground transportation, and detention beds. “If we get more money,” he says, “we do more.”
But he’s also fighting an uphill battle against Democratic jurisdictions committed to shielding illegal immigrants from arrest and deportation.
When an illegal immigrant is arrested, they typically get their fingerprints run through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), which runs those prints against Department of Homeland Security databases so that law enforcement can confirm that an illegal alien was just arrested and booked in a jail. The problem for Homan is that “sanctuary cities won’t give us access to jails anymore.”
What’s more, nonprofits and immigration doves on the left hand out pamphlets ostensibly intended to educate them on their constitutional rights. “I think that’s a bunch of garbage,” Homan says. What they’re actually doing, he contends, is “educating people on how to evade arrest.”
Pressed for concrete examples of traffickers and violent criminals in ICE’s sights who escaped arrest because of sanctuary city policies, he pulled out a pair of glasses and a few sheets of paper with a list of examples he wrote down that day. “Here’s one man still walking the streets in New York because he was ‘educated,’” Homan says. “We’re looking for a person who was arrested for sexual abuse of a person incapable of consent. Why? It was a young girl who could not defend herself. She was violently raped.”
Then he pointed to another example on his list: A man arrested in Massachusetts for witness intimidation as well as assault and battery and rape of a 14-year-old.
So yes, sanctuary cities make it more difficult. “That upsets me, but we’re not giving up,” Homan tells National Review. Confident that Musk’s hiring and onboarding efficiency efforts will bear fruit, Homan pledged to “double” the manpower in sanctuary cities to “make sure we’re doing everything we can to protect public safety,” even if that results in collateral arrests of illegal immigrants without a criminal record at the ICE officers successfully locate their intended target.
Earlier this month, Homan urged Trump’s Justice Department to investigate whether progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) impeded immigration-related law enforcement efforts when she held a “Know Your Rights” webinar informing illegal immigrants how they can evade ICE raids. She also urged immigrants with an open order of removal or who are “worried about getting picked up by ICE” to complete a privacy release form so that her office can intervene.
Anyone other nonprofits or lawmakers Homan is watching on this front? “A lot of NGOs, a lot of these groups,” he said. “I don’t want to share that all with you, because we’re looking at it, and it’s in the middle of investigation. So, I don’t want to show my hand.”
Helping matters for Homan are Trump’s flurry of immigration-related executive orders, which reinstated his first administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, and designated Mexican drug cartels and other transnational organizations — including La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Tren de Aragua (TdA) — as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists. According to press reports, the CIA has also increased covert drone operations in Mexico to track fentanyl labs.
On drug cartel crackdown, Homan thinks the president should do whatever he can “to wipe them off the face of the earth” — including using military force. The road ahead will be difficult, he says, but he’s pleased to be carrying out this mission under a president who is serious about cracking down.
Homan has served as an immigration law enforcement official under six U.S. presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan.
“Every president I’ve worked for — even Clinton, Obama — took steps to secure the border because they understood you can’t have strong national security without border security,” Homan tells NR. “Joe Biden is the first president history station came in office and unsecure the border on purpose. It wasn’t mismanagement. It wasn’t incompetence. He caused this to happen.”