New York
CNN
—
When Tom Homan left the US 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 argue for aggressive border enforcement.
Now, in a full circle moment, the immigration hard-liner is leaving Fox and rejoining Trump as the president-elect prepares to take office again.
“I love Fox, I love the family there, but I think that the calling is clear. I have got to go back and help,” Homan said on “Fox & Friends” Monday morning, hours after Trump announced on his Truth Social account that Homan will be “in charge of our nation’s borders.”
Homan is the first Fox News personality to join the currently-in-formation Trump administration, and he likely won’t be the last. Trump is a dedicated 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 definitely fits that description. He was hired to head ICE’s deportation branch 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 presence across the network’s morning and prime time shows. “They basically make him out to be some kind of border patrol superstar,” said Juliet Jeske, a researcher who runs Decoding Fox News, a project that studies the network’s programming.
Homan was such a Fox staple that Jeske said she had a file dedicated to him. Fox acted “as if it was their job to promote him for Trump’s next 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.
While the revolving door between television and government is a bipartisan and often-criticized phenomenon, it never stopped spinning during Trump’s first term in office. 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.
Once President Joe Biden took office, Homan became an outspoken critic of the Democratic administration.
“I have been on this network for years complaining about this administration did to this border,” Homan said in Monday’s appearance. “I have been yelling and screaming about it, telling them what they need 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 Trump depicted as “border czar.”
“Congratulations to you. It’s bad for us, we lose you as a contributor,” Kilmeade commented.
Homan will no longer be a Fox contributor, effective Monday, a network spokesperson confirmed to CNN.
As recently as Sunday morning, Homan was on Fox as a paid contributor, talking with anchor 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’ll be a humane operation, but it’s a necessary mass deportation operation.”
On Monday, he was back on air as an expected Trump appointee, live from the same location, speaking about the same topic – underscoring just how thin of a line exists between pro-Trump media and the emerging Trump administration. The only big difference on Monday was that he was wearing a tie.