Tom Homan Shares the Personal Toll Behind His Fight to Secure America’s Border

Tom Homan has spent more than three decades confronting the brutal realities of illegal immigration—and according to him, the mission to secure the border is not political. It’s personal.

During a candid interview with Alex Marlow, the former Border Patrol agent and current Border Czar under President Donald Trump opened up about the emotional and human cost that drives his unwavering commitment to border enforcement.

Homan began his federal service in 1984 with the U.S. Border Patrol and later rose to become the first Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Department of Homeland Security. Over the course of his career, he served under six presidents—starting with Ronald Reagan—earning a reputation as a career law enforcement professional respected across administrations.

Today, under President Trump’s second term, Homan has returned from retirement once again to tackle what he describes as a national emergency at the southern border. And with that decision has come relentless political attacks—and even death threats.

When asked about the daily threats directed at him, Homan did not hesitate.

“I don’t care.”

“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,” Homan said. “So 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.”

The cost, he explained, has not only been professional—it has been deeply personal. For months, he has lived apart from his family due to security concerns. But he believes the stakes are too high to walk away.

“If You Wore My Shoes…”

As critics question the administration’s tough immigration policies, Homan says they simply do not understand what he has witnessed firsthand.

“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 operation 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,” Homan said.

The decades he spent on the frontlines, he explained, permanently shaped who he is.

“If you wore my shoes for three and a half decade, you wouldn’t ask that question because I’ve seen so much tragedy in my life, it’s who I am today,” he added. “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?”

His remarks were not delivered as a political argument but as a testimony of lived experience. Homan became visibly emotional recounting specific cases that have stayed with him over the years.

“The two that break my heart is the 19 dead aliens in the back of 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 break light used to be to breath, were pushed out,” Homan detailed.

“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,” he said.

A Law-and-Order Mission

For Homan, securing the border is not merely about sovereignty or enforcement—it is about preventing the cartels from exploiting vulnerable migrants, stopping human trafficking, and preventing preventable deaths.

Supporters of President Trump’s border agenda argue that strong enforcement policies are rooted in humanitarian necessity, not hostility. They contend that open-border policies empower criminal cartels, incentivize dangerous crossings, and ultimately cost lives.

Homan’s message is clear: the human suffering he has witnessed fuels his resolve. After three and a half decades of confronting cartel brutality, trafficking rings, and smuggling operations, he says walking away is not an option.

The critics may see a political fight.

Homan sees the faces of children he never forgot.