Tom Homan, appointed by newly elected President Donald Trump as the successor to his new administrationborder czar,” is a veteran immigration officer and immigration hawk whose career in law enforcement spans decades.

Once an upstate New York police officer and Border Patrol agent, the Obama administration tapped him in 2013 to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation division. During Homan’s time at ICE under President Obama, the agency carried out record numbers of formal deportations. Obama gave Homan a Presidential Rank Award, the highest official recognition.

Trump appointed Homan as acting director of ICE early in his first term. He quickly sparked controversy when he suggested that undocumented immigrants under the Trump administration should “be afraid.”

Homan was one of the masterminds of the first Trump administration’s infamous “zero tolerance” policy, which led to the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents. The parents were prosecuted for illegal entry, while the children were sent to shelters for unaccompanied minors – without a plan to reunite them. He was one of three officials who signed the policy memo that then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen approved greenlighting the separations. He left ICE in June 2018.

During an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” last month, Homan outlined how the US government would carry out the largest deportation operation in American history, one of Trump’s signature campaign promises.

“It’s not threatening to the immigrant community,” Homan said of Trump’s campaign promise. “It should be threatening to the illegal immigrant community. But in the wake of a historic illegal immigration crisis. That has to happen.”

He suggested to CBS News correspondent Cecilia Vega that he would first target criminals and threats to national security, and then try to deport non-criminal migrants who are in the country illegally and are ordered deported. That would require a reversal of the Biden administration’s rules that currently direct ICE to focus on arresting and deporting serious criminals, national security threats and recent border crossings, and those undocumented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for long periods of time. lived without effective protection against deportation for serious crimes.

Homan also indicated he would revive large-scale immigration arrests in workplaces, which the Biden administration halted in 2021. “That will be necessary,” he said of workplace immigration enforcement.

But Homan said the deportation operation would not involve “concentration camps” or a “mass clearing of neighborhoods.”

Asked whether mass deportations can be carried out without separating families, Homan replied: “Of course it is. Families can be deported together.” One study shows that approximately 4 million children of U.S. citizens live with an undocumented parent.