The Vindication of Tom Homan

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, September 02, 2026

 

Where does Tom Homan go to get his apology?

 

When Trump put his border czar in charge of unwinding the controversial Department of Homeland Security operation in Minneapolis earlier this year, critics on the right believed that Homan would be the instrument of a broad Trump climb-down on his signature issue.

 

Gregory Bovino, the border officer who had been in charge in Minneapolis before getting supplanted by Homan, accused him of pretending to be tough while giving up on mass deportations.

 

As it turns out, immigration arrests hit a record for Trump’s second term in June at 43,000, and the number increased again in July to 50,000.

 

Removals, too, were at a high in July — 34,000.

 

There was a dip in enforcement after Trump pulled back from Minneapolis. It didn’t last long, though. As the administration settled on a new approach, and funding from the Big Beautiful Bill Act — $75 billion for ICE — flowed into additional enforcement assets, the numbers began to increase again.

 

Homan has avoided the pyrotechnics favored by the attention-seeking former head of DHS, Kristi Noem, who sent Bovino to Minneapolis. Instead, he’s continued robust enforcement without relishing cinematic images of militarized raids and clashes with protesters for their own sake.

 

In fact, anti-ICE activists are complaining about the lack of flashiness. According to The Guardian, they say that because arrests are “generally happening routinely, and quietly, volunteers who had taken to keeping watch for ICE vehicles and officers in certain cities and blowing whistles when they spotted immigration agents, were lately having trouble seeing how and where ICE is operating.”

 

The new tactics depend heavily on routine pickups of illegal aliens at traffic stops and immigration check-ins, as well as at airports.

 

A spate of news stories has emphasized, in a critical tone, how for the first time a majority of those apprehended haven’t committed other crimes besides their immigration offenses. It may be that Trump and Homan have put too much emphasis in their rhetoric on going after “the worst of the worst,” but there is no reason that more routine immigration offenders should be held harmless.

 

(The effort to track down and detain criminals continues, by the way — Operation Rotten Apple in New York has taken murderers, rapists, and gang members off the streets over the last few weeks.)

 

It is true that staying and working here illegally doesn’t necessarily make someone a threat to public safety. It does, however, involve committing other crimes — identity theft, Social Security fraud, falsifying I-9 employment forms, and the like. Regardless, immigration law very clearly gives the government authority to arrest and detain illegal immigrants, and in some instances, mandates it.

 

ICE is required to detain aliens who are under final orders of removal, and there are plenty of those. Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies points out that immigration judges issued nearly half a million orders of removal in the first nine months of this fiscal year alone.

 

The fact is that the illegal immigrant population in the United States is roughly 15 million people, with a substantial number arriving during the Biden years alone. The only way to reduce this population is to arrest and deport illegal aliens, or to convince them — as a way to avoid their own arrest and deportation — to leave under their own power.

 

It is Tom Homan’s insight that the most politically sustainable way to effect this policy is to pursue it in a nonconfrontational manner and keep it out of the headlines to the extent possible. There is even more the administration could do along these lines if it used various forms of bureaucratic enforcement to squeeze businesses employing illegal workers.

 

For now, though, Homan has established proof of concept for a less lurid, but more effective version of immigration enforcement. There is much work yet to do, but Homan was never waving the white flag on enforcement and now has the numbers to prove it.