Washington Post
April 27, 2016
Thomas Homan, executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Department of Homeland Security)
By Lisa Rein
This story has been updated.
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Thomas Homan deports people. And he’s really good at it.
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Homan is the Washington bureaucrat in charge of rounding up, detaining and kicking illegal immigrants out of the country. As Americans fight over whether the next president should build a wall on the Mexico border to keep migrants out or protect millions of them from deportation, Homan is actually hunting undocumented immigrants down right now, setting strategy for 8,000 officers on the front lines.
He was honored last week with the government’s highest civil service award, bestowed on federal leaders whose work gets “extraordinary” results. According to his bosses at the Department of Homeland Security, not only did Homan successfully handle an unexpected surge of unaccompanied children and families who have streamed here from Central America across the Southwest border, but last year his operations set records for the share of illegal immigrants expelled from the U.S. who had criminal records.
Many of President Obama’s immigration policies have been unpopular with immigration advocates who say he has not done enough to overhaul a system that relies on deportations. But Homeland Security officials were intent on plugging Homan’s success.
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“The first thing I do when I get into the office every day is I read the media stories about immigration,” he said in an interview before receiving a 2015 Presidential Rank Award for distinguished service at a banquet at State Department Thursday night put on by the Senior Executives Association’s Professional Development League. Forty-two other senior executives were honored.
“I sit here in the morning and I get frustrated,” he said. “People don’t understand what we do or how we do it. They just make assumptions.”
The career immigration official is quick to note that people who are deported have exhausted their due-process rights to stay in the United States “and already had their day in court.” Someone in poor health is not going to be automatically expelled, he said.
“Yes, it’s not my favorite part of the job,” Homan said of deportations. “But their due process is over. That final order of removal needs to mean something.”
If Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) gets to the White House, this former New York police officer could be the person charged with deporting approximately 11 million people who are in the United States illegally. Or he could delay kicking out about 5 million undocumented migrants whom the Obama administration has sought to allow to work here legally, making its case last week before the Supreme Court.
Homan, 54, is a plainspoken — he likes to call it outspoken — former patrolman from far-upstate New York with a strawberry-blond crew cut and baby-blue eyes. He has worked almost every job at the agency now called Immigration and Customs Enforcement — border-patrol agent, investigator, supervisor, up the ranks to his current post, executive associate director for enforcement and removal operations. He joined the immigration agency in 1989.
“The entire life cycle of immigration,” he said, referring to the purview of his career. “I’ve arrested aliens. I’ve sat on low houses. I’ve worked on the front lines. I’m a cop in a cop’s job, and cops work for me,” he said, crediting his 27 years in immigration enforcement with earning him the respect of the 8,000 men and women on his staff.
The White House cited his success expanding arrests and detention beds for the recent surge in children and families fleeing violence in Central America. While the number of deportations of illegal immigrants with criminal records has declined in recent years, last year this group made up almost 60 percent of the total number expelled from the country, the largest percentage in recent memory, ICE officials said.
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