In 2018, then-acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) Director Thomas Homan told HuffPost that Congress needed to change immigration laws because, “I’m the first to say, I can’t arrest 11 million people.”

Now that he has recently been appointed as Donald Trump’s “border czar,” he will be charged with exactly that. The president-elect said Monday that Homan, a former law enforcement officer who served in immigration enforcement under multiple presidencies, “would be responsible for all deportations of illegal aliens back to their countries of origin.”

Homan has described the mass deportation in stark terms over the past year, looking for a role in helping Trump with his signature campaign promise. Asked about the high price tag of a mass deportation, he turned the question back to 60 Minutes: “What price are you putting on our national security? Is it worth it?” When the newspaper asked if there was a way for mass deportations to not separate families with mixed immigration status, Homan responded: “Families can be deported together.”

It’s likely a next step for a man who served as acting director of Ice for 16 months under Trump, during what was seen as a period of intense controversy for the agency. The Atlantic documented how Homan “fathered” the Trump administration’s family separation policy, tracing its origins to a 2014 meeting where Homan floated the idea. He defended the policy to the core, saying: “The aim was not to traumatise. The goal was to stop the madness, stop the death, stop the rape, stop the children dying, stop the cartels doing what they do.”

This year, his speech to the Republican national convention began with a folksy “how are you” and a shoutout to New York, his home state. He then delivered an impassioned speech defending Trump and criticizing the Biden administration on immigration, saying Joe Biden’s policies were essentially “national suicide.”

“As a man who has spent 34 years deporting illegal aliens, I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden has released into our country in violation of federal law: You better start packing now – you’re damn right – because you We are going home,” he said to loud applause.

Addressing the cartels in Mexico smuggling fentanyl, he said: “If President Trump returns to power, he will designate you as a terrorist organization. He’s going to wipe you off the face of the earth. You’re done.’

At a conference of national conservatives this year, he said it more clearly, according to Semafor.

“Trump is coming back in January, I will be on his heels and I will lead the largest deportation force this country has ever seen. They haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until 2025.”

Homan started his law enforcement career as an agent in upstate New York, but found it sleepy, HuffPost reported, so he moved to California to work on the border. He served four years as a Border Patrol agent and then rose through the ranks of immigration enforcement under six presidencies, starting with Ronald Reagan.

In 2015, when Barack Obama was in power, Homan received the Presidential Rank award for distinguished service for his work in deporting people. A Washington Post profile about him and the award in early 2016 noted that earlier in his career he would not publicly reveal which side he was on in the immigration debate, instead focusing on enforcing laws. But according to the profile, he was “very good” at deporting people.

After his time as acting director of Ice, Homan worked as a visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation, the Washington DC think tank behind Project 2025. He wrote op-eds attacking the Biden administration on immigration and criticizing the bipartisan immigration deal. He wrote in an op-ed that “race-baiting Democrats” had berated him when he ran Ice.

“It is clear that the left will play the race card when it suits them to silence and demonize their opponents and win fleeting political points. But I stopped caring what my critics thought for a long time,” he wrote.

Homan is listed as a contributor to Project 2025, although his name does not appear in any specific chapter. In response to the backlash over the project, Trump’s campaign previously claimed that people involved in the project would not hold roles in his next administration.

Homan also started a nonprofit called Border911, which organized a lecture tour across the country to “educate the American people about the facts of an unsecured border,” the group’s website says, helping them “understand that border security is is crucial. security and prosperity of the country”.

An investigation by a group of nonprofit newsrooms has detailed how Border911 and Homan were connected to the America Project, the election lie-spreading dark money group founded by Patrick Byrne and Mike Flynn. The investigation found that Homan said “millions of people moving to sanctuary cities will be counted in the next census” in a way that would redistribute congressional seats for Democrats, which he called “almost insidious.”

Video clips of Homan sparring with members of Congress have gone viral in recent days. In one clip, he dodges questions from Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during a congressional hearing about whether he authored the family separation policy. In another, he tells Democrats in Congress that they have “failed the American people.” When Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal tried to rein in his testimony and remind him of the time limits, he pushed back and called the hearing a “circus.”

“You work for me,” he told Jayapal. “I am a taxpayer.”