President-elect Donald Trump’s recently announced choice for “border czar,” Tom Homan, has an “extreme and ineffective” track record, according to Mike Pence’s former homeland security adviser.

Trump wrote late Sunday on Truth Social that he was “pleased to announce” that Homan, his former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “will be joining the Trump administration in charge of the borders of our nation.”

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.”

Olivia Troye, who advised former Vice President Pence on national security issues during the first Trump administration, denounced Trump’s decision on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday.

“Trump’s plan to appoint Tom Homan as ‘border czar’ is no coincidence. Homan’s track record? Extreme and ineffective policies that target all immigrants and not just criminals,” she wrote. “But the real goal goes deeper: to dismantle DHS and unravel our homeland security framework as we know it. It’s not about solutions; it is about disruption.”

Newsweek Received comments Monday from Troye via a direct message on social media, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung via email and Homan via an online form.

In a follow-up post, Troye, now a media commentator and Trump critic, said Homan spread disinformation about an undocumented immigrant who allegedly caused the deadly wildfires in Northern California in October 2017.

“In 2017, Tom Homan, as acting ICE director, chose to spread disinformation about the California wildfires, saying an undocumented immigrant started them. He then attacked the local sheriff’s office as they were responding to this natural fire. disaster, asking them to turn the individual over to ICE,” Troye said.

She added: “The immigrant had NOTHING to do with the bushfires. Those of us who worked at DHS and were actually committed to homeland security watched internally in horror as it unfolded. Remember this in the future if things like this happen again.”

At the time of the fires, Homan released a statement about the Sonoma County Jail’s repeated release of a “dangerous criminal alien.” Sonoma County was among the areas affected by the wildfires.

“This is especially troubling in light of the massive forest fires already devastating the region,” Homan said in the statement.

Meanwhile, Homan said Fox & Friends Monday that he was “honored” that Trump had selected him as “border czar.”

“I’ve been on this network for years complaining about what this government has done to this border. I have yelled and screamed about it and what they need to do to fix the problem. So when the president asked me, ‘Do you want to come? back and fix it?’ Of course I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t.

“I’m honored that the president asked me to come back and help solve this national security crisis, so I’m looking forward to it,” Homan said.

He added: “I have to go back and help because every morning… I’m pissed off about what this (Biden) administration has done to my life with the most secure border, so I’m going to go back and do what I can to fix it unload.”

Who is Tom Homan?

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 first Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, which led 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 and said he was one of 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.”