Coop Scoop: Trump Poaches Border Czar from The Sopranos

"I don't give a shit."

December 11, 2024

By Marc Cooper

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If Tom Homan were of Italian lineage, he could easily have been cast as a foul-mouthed, bullying captain of the Soprano crime family. He’d fit right in during a meeting in the back room of the Bada Bing, alongside Silvio, Paulie, Christopher, Ralphie, and Tony, where the boys would be yukking it up and bragging about their latest takedown.

Tom “The Boot” Homan

But unlike the other characters, Homan wouldn’t need to be acting. In real life, as they say on Xitter, Trump’s border czar is a belligerent, aggressive, and profane loudmouth, prone to sweeping threats and bullying. I might also add that he’s as insensitive as he is downright obnoxious.

When he worked for Trump 1.0 as acting Director of ICE, a position for which he was never confirmed by the Senate, he headed up the zero-tolerance child separation policy that tore 5,000 children from their parents and shipped them off to overcrowded detention centers thousands of miles from the border.

ARREST THE MAYORS OF SANCTUARY CITIES

Indeed, he is known as the "intellectual father" of that inhumane policy. Even after the courts ordered it to be shut down in 2018, there are still hundreds of immigrant children who the U.S. government has yet to reunite with their families. Not to overstate it, but they were literally kidnapped 6 or 7 years ago by Homan’s policy, and there has been no legal accountability.

And now, Homan is back under Trump 2.0 in the newly invented role of "border czar," where he vows to pick up right where he left off. In the meantime, he joined the extremist Heritage Foundation and became a regular presence on Fox News, where he blamed immigrants for all of America’s ills. At one point, he even invented the phantasmagorical lie that immigrants were responsible for "200,000... 300,000 murders." He also joined the Project 2025 team.

He constantly rails against sanctuary cities, and when Denver declared last month that the city and local police would not cooperate with mass deportation plans, Homan responded: "Me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing: he's willing to go to jail. I'm willing to put him in jail."

He also bragged: "Trump comes back in January. I'll be on his heels, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen."

While Homan has no authority to jail the mayor or anybody else, he thinks like a rough-and-tumble street cop. Or, he could pass for one of the fake, mouthy wrestlers in the WWE. Or a Soprano thug. That’s because Homan was a street cop before moving on to become a Border Patrol agent, where he enjoyed round-the-clock action chasing poor migrants through the bushes.

Obama brought him into government to oversee deportations, and he did a bang-up job, expelling nearly half a million immigrants in 2013, doubling George W. Bush’s record numbers. As early as 2014, he proposed the child separation policy to Obama, but was turned down. However, he got his way three years later when Trump green lit the policy, arguing it would terrify future migrants from crossing. It didn’t. The flow never stopped, and the policy resulted only in globally broadcast videos of toddlers in cages and the creation of several hundred orphans who the Biden administration has been working to resolve.

I DON’T GIVE A SHIT

Though Homan oversaw the separation policy, neither he nor his accomplices bothered to record nearly any of the data necessary to reunite families.

And he has no regrets. Speaking at a 2023 CPAC conference, he angrily declared: "I’m sick and tired of hearing about family separation, and I’m still being sued over that. So come give me... I don’t give a shit. Right? Bottom line is, we enforced the law."

For another taste of this thug, Mediaite reports:

“He made headlines in 2022 when he reportedly showed up at notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, but left before his scheduled speech. Homan reportedly claimed he backed out of the white nationalist event after reading online that Fuentes had praised Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine."

So, hanging out with neo-Nazis is no problem for him, but supporting Russia? That’s a step too far. This was two years ago, so who knows where he stands on Russia now.

Politico put together a 2-minute video on Homan that should give you a good sense of the guy, even though the mainstream media narration is somewhat milquetoast. It’s still worth watching.

As I wrote here a few weeks back, the atrocious high-profile nominations of incompetents, drunks, and quacks like Hegseth, Oz, RFK Jr., Bondi, and Gabbard are “shiny objects” of distraction. Yes, they should be opposed. Trump should encounter as many obstacles as possible. But I warned that, in the end, they were irrelevant, as they would merely and only be taking orders from Trump, and there was a pool of hundreds of MAGA sycophants and lackeys on call to replace any of them. The great danger, I argued, is that these MAGA fanatics would be appointed to all the executive and mid-level agency management positions that the Senate has no say on while our political capital gets spent on the five worst cabinet picks.

THE FOX GUARDING THE HENHOUSE

A perfect example of this is the downright chilling choice by Trump this week of Harmeet Dhillon to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. I had never heard of her. Have you? We must travel in the wrong circles, as Dhillon is another hard-line extremist who is a champion of trying to roll back voting rights.

The DOJ division she will head is supposed to be the one arm of the government that zealously defends civil liberties, intervenes against police abuse, and, most importantly, fights to ensure and protect voting rights.

Not anymore. She is a champion among election deniers and has been an ardent activist in restricting voting rights. When Trump announced her appointment on social media, he wrote :

“[She has] stood up consistently to protect our cherished civil liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our free speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations that use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.”

He also noted she “is one of the top election lawyers in the country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted.”

Her law firm, founded in 2006, has been at the forefront of challenging voting rights in more than a dozen states, including Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina. And yes, she is an election denier.

Civil liberties lawyers fighting voting restrictions have often had the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division on their side as an active ally. But starting in January, those lawyers will now have to face not only MAGA state representatives but also the DOJ, in the person of Dhillon. Oh, I almost forgot—back in 2023, Dhillon took a run at being head of the RNC, claiming it was too soft in combat. She lost. Her new position at the DOJ, however, will give her much more power to shape civil liberties—in the wrong direction.

SENATE GOES WOBBLIER – IF POSSIBLE

After Trump gave a resounding re-endorsement of the hard-drinking, sexual predator, and second-rate Fox anchor Pete Hegseth to head the Department of Defense, some mildly outspoken senators started wetting their pants.

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, who had voiced skepticism about Hegseth, is now changing her tune. And the mainstream media, which has been privately talking to senators who say one thing in public and another behind closed doors, has reported this week that Hegseth’s nomination is “back from the brink.” I certainly don’t have the cherished access that these Beltway reporters have, but they seem—or pretend to—know something the rest of us don’t.

At this point, I would not be surprised if the whole pack of Trump’s worst cabinet picks gets confirmed, as the Republican Senate rolls onto its back to have its tummy patted by The Don. ++

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