Tom Homan: Enemy of the People

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

After the brutal daytime murder of two “middle class” white radicals – Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti – by the occupying ICE army stationed in Minneapolis, Washington is getting cold feet, at least for the “bad optics” of shooting white people in the face. Of course, the regular parade of “radical” Democrats trotted out their opposition to the slayings (Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota; Chris Murphy, Senator for Connecticut) and promptly voted to approve the DHS budget in the House of Representatives. Even the GOPs own politicians¹ (at least those closer to the center and left-flank of their party) are squeamish about the government murder of two Euro-Amerikan labor aristocrats that’s being beamed onto screens across the country.² In a move designed to shore up his wavering Euro-Amerikan base, a round of “changes” has been touted by the Trump administration. In addition to closed-door discussions with the Democrats (including Governor Walz), DHS will be withdrawing Gregory Bovino, the Customs and Border Patrol goon presently in charge of the DHS army in Minneapolis, and replacing him with Tom Homan, the so-called “Border Czar.” This is being hailed by many (though not all) of the bourgeois news outlets (who are either easily duped or are eager collaborators with the regime) as a moderating move from Trump. It is not.

Who is Tom Homan and why is his arrival in Minnesota important? This enemy of the people started as a cop before joining Border Patrol in 1984. In 1988, he joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). By 2013, Homan had been appointed to serve as the head of Enforcement and Removal of what had by then become ICE by the “Deporter In Chief,” President Obama.

Compared to Bovino, who has spent his prior career in border cities acting with jack-booted impunity, Homan is much more polished. Bovino paraded around California as a Border Patrol sector chief, posing with long guns on horseback. He directed a short snuff film for Border Patrol called “The Gotaway” where a fictional migrant sneaks across the border and stabs the first person he sees. In a more recent Bovino production, Darth Vader is depicted as a Border Patrol agent. “We don’t want our border patrol agents quiet,” he said in an October interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We want them engaged in the fight. So I asked several times, ‘Well, how about, you know, I go up north?’”

Bovino’s settler-cowboy style caught Kristi Noem’s eye when he instructed his agents to mask up and carry out three days of raids on farms and Home Depot parking lots in 2024. Last spring, Bovino outlined a plan to take his strategy — using Border Patrol to engage in an “urban immigration crackdown” (in the words of the Wall Street Journal) — across the entire country with him at the vanguard of the reactionary spear. “A city-hopping campaign, an interior-operations campaign,” he told the WSJ. “Let’s take it everywhere in the United States.”

Bovino is the cocksure Erwin Rommel – or Andrew Jackson – of the Washington immigration strategy.³ Tom Homan isn’t like that. Homan knows how to talk to the press. He’s spent a good part of his career in press conferences or in front of cameras. If Bovino is Rommel, Tom Homan is the unassuming Heinrich Himmler – or the unassuming slaver Martin van Buren.

During his time in the Obama administration, Homan repeatedly proposed an idea that even the Deporter In Chief, a man who gleefully authorized hundreds of remote killings of civilians and even some American citizens, thought was inhuman. This idea was the horrific scheme he calls “Family Separation.” Homan’s policy was eventually put into place by the first Trump administration after he pushed again and again to get Washington to adopt it. The policy, pitched by the gray-faced police functionary as a punitive, zero-tolerance plan to “deter” undocumented immigrants, required DHS agents to forcibly separate parents from their children when being taken into custody. Using the machinery put in place by Obama, federal agents tore thousands of children and infants from their parents and guardians. These children were held in overcrowded “border control centers,” and many spent up to three weeks with minimal food, no clean clothing or bathing facilities, and no adult care.

This is the Tom Homan being rotated into Minneapolis. Washington is replacing a murderous cowboy with an equally cruel and far more efficient administrator. Since arriving in Minnesota, Homan has promised that DHS is “working on a draw down plan.” However, he has been clear: The draw down depends on local authorities submitting to DHS requirements and supporting ICE raids.

“We’re not surrendering our mission at all,” said Homan. “We’re just doing it smarter.”

Homan is the “good cop” to Bovino’s “bad cop.” He is the slick technocrat to Bovino’s cowboy. The administration wants you to forget Minneapolis, but to remember that it will deploy Bovino as a swagger-stick whenever the going gets tough. This bait and switch has been used by the “law” in this country since it was founded in the 19th century. This time, we aren’t falling for it.

Tom Homan is an enemy of the people, the architect of misery. Unlike Bovino, Homan reminded the press that “I didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines. You haven’t seen me.” Homan is not a mediation of the Washington policy. Instead, Washington wants to go back to normal: cruel and inhuman mistreatment of working class people under a protective media blackout. Tom Homan doesn’t signify reform, and his unctuous presence does not mean Minnesota is any safer from the DHS army occupying the state. Replacing Bovino with Homan is the swapping out of one colonial administrator who was doing too much damage to the colonial infrastructure – the settlers themselves, the Euro-Amerikans – with another, who promises a “quieter” kind of monstrousness.

Resistance must continue, and Homan must be seen for the monster that he is.

1. We often refer to the right of the American political spectrum as the “right-fascists,” as compared with the Democrats, or the “left-fascists” here at the Clarion. ↩︎
2. The Clarion presently defines labor aristocrats according to a global average price of labor power; those workers who receive higher than the global average within the imperial center are considered labor aristocrats. It is debatable as to whether Alex Pretti was a labor aristocrat or petty bourgeois, as he was a VA nurse. For the purposes of this analysis, the distinction is not important. ↩︎
3. One of the Nazi regime’s most capable generals, often disgustingly praised by US historians. ↩︎