President-elect Donald Trump has announced that Tom Homan, his former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will be in charge of the mass deportations Trump promised during his campaign.

“I am pleased to announce that former ICE Director, and loyal Border Patrol man, Tom Homan, will join the Trump Administration in charge of our nation’s borders (“The Border Czar”),” he wrote on his Truth Social website. late on Sunday.

Trump said Homan “will be in charge of all deportations of illegal aliens back to their countries of origin,” in addition to overseeing the northern and southern borders and “all maritime and aviation security.”

“I have known Tom for a long time, and there is no one better at guarding and controlling our borders,” Trump said. “Congratulations to Tom. I have no doubt he will do a fantastic job, which we have been waiting for for a long time.”

Homan has been contacted for comment via his website.

Trump had said Homan, a Project 2025 employee, would play a role in his administration if re-elected in October.

Homan is one of dozens of former Trump administration officials who contributed to Project 2025, a nearly 900-page document detailing policy plans for the next Republican administration developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Although Trump repeatedly tried to distance himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, his own platform shares major policy similarities with the document, including plans for mass deportations.

In an interview on Fox News’ Futures on Sunday morningHoman defended Trump’s plan for mass deportations and said ICE would take action to carry them out in a “humane manner.”

“It will be a targeted, planned operation, carried out by the men of ICE. The men and women of ICE do this every day. They are good at it,” he told presenter Maria Bartiromo.

“If we go there, we will know who we are looking for. We will most likely know where they will be, and it will be done in a humane manner… these people will be well cared for. It will be a humane operation, but it is necessary, a mass deportation operation.”

He also denied that the military would be involved in rounding up and arresting immigrants in the country illegally and that the focus would be on those who pose a threat to public safety and national security.

Homan also said Trump’s plan will “save taxpayers money” in the long run.

The cost of arresting, detaining, processing and deporting a million people a year would cost $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade, or about $88 billion a year, according to a recent report by the nonprofit organization American Immigration Council. The report also says mass deportations would disrupt major industries, such as construction and agriculture, that are already facing shortages.

Asked about the cost of the plan, Trump told NBC News on Thursday: “It’s not a matter of a price tag… Really, we have no choice. When people kill and kill, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they are going back to those countries because they won’t stay here.’

Opinion polls during the campaign showed majorities in favor of mass deportations among voters, but election day exit polls showed stronger support for moving toward legal status for undocumented immigrants than for deporting them, while immigration remains on the voters’ priority list decreased.

Homan has worked in immigration enforcement for more than three decades. A former New York police officer, he joined the U.S. Border Patrol in 1984. He worked as a Border Patrol agent, investigator, supervisor and other positions before being named executive deputy director of ICE in 2013 during former President Barack Obama’s administration.

Trump appointed Homan as acting director of ICE in January 2017, a position he held until his retirement in June 2018.

During that time, he oversaw the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, which is leading to thousands of families being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Atlantic Ocean called Homan the “intellectual father” of the policy in a 2022 report, saying he was among the first to propose the idea of ​​prosecuting undocumented migrants who cross the border illegally with their children and separating families.

The plan was rejected as “heartless and impractical” during the Obama administration, the report said, but later adopted during Trump’s first term.

In 2023, Homan said he was “sick and tired” of hearing about family separations. “I’m still getting sued for that. I don’t care about it, right? The bottom line is we enforced the law,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

At the National Conservatism Conference earlier this year, Homan said: “Trump is coming back in January, I will be on his heels and I will lead the largest deportation operation this country has ever seen. *still have to wait until 2025.”