Tom Homan Reveals Heartbreaking Reason He Fights To Secure Border
Border Czar Tom Homan has revealed the deeply personal and tragic experiences that inspired him to return to public service under President Donald J. Trump, saying his mission to secure the southern border is driven by decades of witnessing human suffering caused by unchecked illegal immigration.
In an emotional interview with Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow, Homan spoke candidly about what he described as the devastating human toll of open-border policies — including the loss of innocent lives, rampant human trafficking, and cartel-driven violence that preys on vulnerable migrants.
A veteran of border enforcement since 1984, Homan began his career with the U.S. Border Patrol and rose through the ranks to become the first Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director to have served at every level of the Department of Homeland Security. Over four decades and six presidential administrations — from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump — he has become one of the nation’s most respected and battle-tested defenders of immigration law.
Now serving again under President Trump, Homan said he knew the return would bring intense political and personal attacks.
“I don’t care,” Homan told Marlow. “I mean, this is the second time I came out of retirement for the president. It’s hard to say no to the president of the United States and help him fix something where thousands of lives have been lost.”
He acknowledged the personal sacrifices his family has endured.
“I knew the hate was coming. And, you know, unfortunately, my family pays the price. I haven’t lived with my family in months because of the death threats against me. But my family understands the important mission.”
Homan’s voice broke as he described the horrific realities he has seen over the years — tragedies that he said most Americans will never fully grasp.
“If they held the dead children I’ve held, talked to little girls as young as 9 who were raped multiple times by handlers from the cartel, standing on the back of a tractor-trailer when 19 people are at your feet because they baked to death, including a 5-year-old boy… running operations in Arizona where alien smuggling cartels are ripping bodies from each other with drugs, and when someone couldn’t pay their smuggling fees, they’d torture them and call their relatives and let them listen while they torture them and kill them because they couldn’t pay the fees. These are just a few things.”
He continued, describing how these tragedies have shaped his life and hardened his resolve to fight for border security:
“If you wore my shoes for three and a half decades, you wouldn’t ask that question because I’ve seen so much tragedy in my life, it’s who I am today. So when I’m getting asked to come back and secure the border and you know it’s going to save lives, how do you say no to that?”
Homan’s most haunting memory, he said, came from a tragedy involving 19 migrants found dead inside a tractor-trailer.
“When I arrived on that crime scene, when I got to the back of that tractor-trailer, there were several bodies that already hit the ground and when the doors finally opened, people rushed out to get air and some of the dead bodies, that were fighting for a small hole where the brake light used to be to breathe, were pushed out,” Homan said.
“When I looked back in there, I saw a little boy in his underwear, turned out to be five years old, dead. With … his father who was cradling him on top of him. Most of them, if not all of them, were in their underwear because they were trying to get some relief from the serious heat in that steel box.”
These memories, Homan said, fuel his commitment to restore border integrity and end the humanitarian disasters that flourish under weak enforcement. For him, this is not just policy — it’s personal.
“I came back because it saves lives,” Homan concluded. “I’ve seen what happens when the border is out of control — and I’ve seen how many people it destroys. We can do better. Under President Trump, we will do better.”