There’s that great scene in the first Sin City film where Dwight, played by Clive Owen, is sat in a bar surveying the colorful host of miscreants around him and then he gets to Mickey Rourke’s Marv, the local neckbreaker who’s just got done serving time in the slammer. Marv’s face is plastered to hell after a brutal fight and he’s knocking back shots at the counter.
“Most people think Marv is crazy,” Dwight mumbles, his mouth full of peanuts.
“He just had the rotten luck of being born in the wrong century. He’d be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an axe into somebody’s face, or in a Roman arena taking a sword to other gladiators like him.”
Every time I look at Tom Homan I hear that monologue, word for word. If you know who Tom Homan is and you’ve seen his big scary mug, you’ll understand why.
I described him on Twitter today as having “peak Anglo skullsplitter physiognomy.” Frankly, if he belongs anywhere, it’s on some muddy field south of Calais, laying into a French knight with a billhook, or in the northern borders drowning a Scotsman in a shallow burn.
Homan has a head and a look of ice-cold malice behind his eyes that would send most men—armed, unarmed, it doesn’t matter—running for their lives if they know what’s good for them.
Some men are just built for grim deeds. Tom Homan is built for grim deeds.
But I’m not here to wax lyrical about Homan’s potential as a physical avatar of the war god. I just want to say that Homan, unlike Marv, is absolutely the right man in the right place at the right time. He can stay in the present century.
Right for what? For managing the largest deportation operation in American history, that’s what.
Homan was in charge of ICE as acting director between 2017 and 2018, during the first Trump presidency. He was responsible for the controversial “family separation” policy. But Homan didn’t give a rat’s ass about the controversy. He knew that there had to be a strong deterrent—that breaking up and processing families for deportation separately would stop them coming—and he wasn’t afraid to say so.
Watch video of his encounter with AOC in the House. Not an inch of ground given. AOC may be Alex Stein’s favourite big booty Latina, but Tom Homan wasn’t thinking about anything but the job at hand. The doe eyes and the retarded bleating don’t work on him.
Thankfully, Donald Trump knows how solid Homan is. It was expected that Trump would bring him back—he said so during the campaign—and now we have confirmation. Homan will be serving as “border czar,” Trump posted on Truth Social, with responsibility for all the nation’s borders. And, more importantly, he’ll be the man presiding over the mass deportation of illegal aliens Trump has made his flagship policy.
Homan has stated his support for Trump’s immigration plans and promised they will be unlike anything the country has ever carried out before. Over the summer, he said Trump’s opponents “ain’t seen sh*t yet… Wait until 2025.”
When asked in a recent interview with 60 Minutes whether mass deportation would require family separation, Homan said it “needs to be considered absolutely.”
“Their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally,” Homan explained. “So he created that crisis.”
Homan hasn’t softened, despite being sued over family separation. If anything, his attitude has hardened.
We have every indication that Trump really will pursue this policy. In an interview with NBC, he batted away complaints that it would be “too expensive” and said there would be “no price tag” attached to the scheme.
“It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not—really, we have no choice,” Trump explained.
The American public expects Trump to do it too. In a post-election poll, a majority of voters said they believe Trump will deport millions of people.
The rub lies with deeper attitudes towards that fact, and in particular to the methods that will be employed. Ninety percent of Republicans are okay with mass deportation, the survey reports, but 80% of Democrats aren’t—not a big surprise. However, a significantly smaller proportion, 58% of Republicans, agree with the statement that illegal immigrants should be “arrested and put in detention camps while awaiting deportation hearings.” Only 15% of Democrats agree. Three quarters of Democrats oppose detaining illegals in the manner, as do 31% of Republicans.
If the family-separation policy was controversial—well…
Like Tom Homan said, you “ain’t seen sh*t yet.”
Mass deportation will obviously involve the use of large processing and housing facilities—call them camps, facilities, holiday parks or whatever you want—and this will obviously upset people and they’ll reach for familiar, ridiculous comparisons from recent history.
The ridiculousness will do nothing to diminish their power in the public consciousness. We will be told the policy is racism, extermination, genocide, and many who might not otherwise agree will be swayed by the outpouring of emotion and the pitch and volume of the protests.
Much of the animus will be personal and will be directed at individuals, for basic psychological but also pragmatic reasons. Trump will get it, of course, but he’s already Hitler and Caesar and Mussolini and Stalin and every bad dude from history, so I’m not sure it will make all that much of a difference to him.
Others, however, will be affected. Mass deportation is the right thing to do. Illegal immigrants shouldn’t be in the country—it’s in the name, illegal—but even so, many involved in the policy will falter. America is a very different country from when Eisenhower launched Operation Wetback, and that was maybe 1/10th of the scale of what Trump is aiming to do now. There will be changes of heart, resignations, even denunciations.
The policy’s success or failure will depend on men who can stay the course.
Trump won the election in spectacular style. He has a popular mandate to do all the things he said he would do. Even so it’s going to be a fight, it’s going to be tough.
Tough times call for tough men. And Tom Homan is a tough man.