After making immigration a central issue in this year’s presidential election, newly elected President Donald Trump announced that Tom Homan will join his administration as the new “border czar.”

Trump wrote late Sunday in a post on Truth Social that Homan would be in charge of the country’s borders, “including, but not limited to, the southern border, the northern border, 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 wrote.

Homan returns to a top border security role within the Trump White House after serving as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the first 18 months of Trump’s first term. Prior to his tenure in the Trump Administration, he served in the Obama Administration as Executive Deputy Director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations. In 2015, Obama gave Homan the Presidential Rank Award.

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Homan joins a Trump administration that has pledged to carry out mass deportations, which Trump has said would number in the millions.

When Trump was in office, ICE was criticized by Democrats for a policy that separated migrant parents from their children. It was a policy championed by Homan. Homan told PBS in 2018 that keeping families together during arrests was a logistical issue.

“A child cannot be taken into custody by U.S. Marshals while the parents are charged with entering the country illegally,” he told PBS.

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Under Trump’s presidency, Homan said some U.S. citizens could be among those deported. He suggested in an interview with CBS News that children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants could be victims of deportation.

“Their parent definitely entered the country illegally, had a child that he knew was in the country illegally. So he created that crisis,” he said.

Homan has also widely criticized cities and states for being so-called “havens” for illegal immigrants in the US. In 2018, he suggested California would lose funding after the state passed a bill that prevented law enforcement from investigating a person’s legal status and arresting people whose only alleged crime was related to immigration.

Homan said in a Fox News interview that the policy puts “politics before public safety.”

While apprehensions at the U.S. southwest border fell in 2017, apprehensions increased in 2018 and reached a record high in 2019.

After COVID-19 caused major disruptions at border crossings in 2020, apprehensions rose to unprecedented levels in 2021-2023 before declining in 2024, ICE data shows.