New York
CNN
—

When Tom Homan left the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in 2018, he didn’t go far from Donald Trump’s administration — he joined Fox News as a paid contributor and used the platform to advocate for aggressive border enforcement.

Now, in a full-circle moment, the immigration hardliner is leaving Fox and rejoining Trump as the newly elected president prepares to return to power.

“I love Fox, I love the family there, but I think the calling is clear. I have to go back and help,” Homan said Monday morning on Fox & Friends, hours after Trump announced on his Truth Social account that Homan “will be in charge of the borders of our country.”

Homan is the first Fox News personality to join the current Trump administration, and he likely won’t be the last. Trump is a devoted Fox viewer, despite his occasional social media posts and comments criticizing the right-wing network, and he has a history of hiring TV personalities he likes.

Homan certainly fits that description. He was hired to head ICE’s deportation division during the Obama administration and was named acting director of the agency when Trump took over in 2017.

Once Homan became a Fox contributor, he was a regular on the network’s morning and primetime shows. “They’re basically portraying him as some kind of Border Patrol superstar,” said Juliet Jeske, a researcher who directs Decoding Fox News, a project that studies the network’s programming.

Homan was such a fixture at Fox that Jeske said she had a file devoted to him. Fox acted “as if it was their job to promote him for the next Trump administration,” Jeske said. “It wasn’t subtle.”

Trump explicitly told “Fox & Friends” co-host Lawrence Jones in a January interview that Homan would be a key part of his border enforcement plan.

Although the revolving door between television and government is a bipartisan and often criticized phenomenon, it never stopped spinning during Trump’s first term. Between 2017 and 2020, there were 20 known cases of Fox-to-Trump moves, including Anthony Scaramucci, Richard Grenell, Heather Nauert, Morgan Ortagus and Bill Shine.

When President Joe Biden took office, Homan became an outspoken critic of the Democratic administration.

“I have been on this network for years complaining that this administration has attacked this border,” Homan said in his appearance Monday. “I yelled and screamed about it and told them what to do to fix it.”

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said during the segment that Homan worked with Trump “to come up with his job description,” which portrayed Trump as a “border czar.”

“Congratulations. It’s bad for us, we lose you as a contributor,” Kilmeade said.

Homan will no longer be a contributor to Fox as of Monday, a network spokesperson confirmed to CNN.

As recently as Sunday morning, Homan was on Fox as a paid contributor, speaking with host Maria Bartiromo about Trump’s plans for mass deportations – and criticizing the media.

“I keep reading stories about, you know, ‘concentration camps.’ ICE has the highest detention standards in the industry,” Homan said. “These people will be well taken care of. It will be a humane operation, but it is a necessary mass deportation operation.”

On Monday, he was back on air as an expected Trump appointee, live from the same location, speaking on the same topic — underscoring how thin the line is between pro-Trump media and the incoming Trump administration. The only major difference on Monday was that he was wearing a tie.