SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
A new Trump administration official has taken over the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Tom Homan, who serves as the White House so-called border czar, met with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz earlier today. This comes after the departure of Border Patrol's Gregory Bovino, who had been the public face of the operation, including encounters that left two protesters dead. We wanted to fill in some of Homan's backstory and talk about what this leadership shuffle might mean for this tense situation in the Twin Cities. So we called up Caitlin Dickerson, investigative reporter for The Atlantic. She has been reporting on immigration policy for years and joins us now. Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
CAITLIN DICKERSON: Hey, Scott. Thanks for having me.
DETROW: I want to zoom out and get to Homan's backstory and bio in a moment. But let's start with this. In this moment, in this tense situation, what, to you, is the most meaningful difference between Greg Bovino and Tom Homan?
DICKERSON: So Tom Homan is a longtime leader in ICE, whereas Bovino comes from the Border Patrol, and ICE is our law enforcement agency that carries out immigration enforcement in the interior of the country. I think that's important because it's an entirely different beast when you're carrying out arrests in American cities, when you're interacting with American citizens, people who have more legal rights and protections than those who are trying to cross the border for the first time and who are just generally more sensitive to deal with. All of that is stuff that Homan is intimately familiar with. So I think there's a big change there.
I mean, he's a longtime leader in D.C. of immigration enforcement operations across Democratic and Republican administrations, whereas Bovino was really kind of a fringe character in the Border Patrol until he was elevated under Trump. And so, to a certain extent, I think the administration is trying to bring forward somebody who has experience talking to the national press and who is maybe - they're trying to frame as a sort of moderating figure. But when we get into his background, I think there's a lot of evidence to push back against that when it comes to Homan's actual record.
DETROW: That's what I was curious about what you thought because whether it's a professionalization or, in some cases, people are saying it's a more moderate approach, this is being framed as a de-escalatory move. Do you see it that way based on what you know about Tom Homan and his background?
DICKERSON: Hard for me to see it that way, Scott, because I've spent years reporting on Tom Homan. I know him well. I've interviewed him extensively. And a big part of that time, I spent reporting on the first Trump administration's family separation policy at the Southern border, one of, if not the most controversial and aggressive enforcement policies of that entire administration. And Tom Homan was the architect of it. He admitted this to me in interviews.
He told me that he first proposed the idea to separate families at the border under the Obama administration. Both he and former secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, told me that Johnson rejected the idea because he thought it was inhumane. Homan brought it back up under the first Trump administration and pushed really hard over the course of more than a year to get that policy put into place, even going so far as to say things that turned out not to be true, such as that there was a clear procedure in place for how to make sure that parents and children were safely reunited at one point, and really just embarking on this pressure campaign that ultimately led to thousands of families being separated.
DETROW: And that was probably, with maybe one or two exceptions, one of the policies of the first Trump administration that got the most backlash, got the most political response, really upset people across the political spectrum. Did Tom Homan ever back away from that? Did he ever say that this was wrong or concede that mistakes were made in any way, shape or form?
DICKERSON: He's really waffled since then. So initially, as I said, Tom Homan was not ashamed to be a big supporter of this policy. He stood behind Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, when Sessions announced the policy to separate families at a press conference in San Diego. When I interviewed Homan years later, he was, again, very open about the role that he played. But I did notice that during President Trump's most recent campaign, Homan did try to start to back away from family separations a little bit, which was confusing given that he was on the record acknowledging the critical role that he played. But I think he did understand that it was an unpopular policy and so tried to sort of shift the narrative afterward.
DETROW: I think the overarching story of the second Trump administration is how much more extreme it's been than the first one, that there were policies where the White House kind of stopped or pulled back or reassessed or people in positions of power said we're not going to do this the first time around. That just hasn't happened on so many fronts this time around. What do you see, if anything, that's different about Tom Homan in the second administration compared to the first administration?
DICKERSON: So Tom Homan has definitely moved further and further to the right, starting in the first Trump administration into the Biden administration. But why I think he's probably being called in is because of a skill that he's demonstrated throughout his career. In reporting on Homan, I consistently heard that he was always really good at making everybody feel like he was their ally. So as much as he is an enforcement hard-liner and used really aggressive language to justify deporting just about anybody that federal authorities can get their hands on, he was also someone in the Obama administration, for example, who people who were more advocacy-minded at DHS felt they could go to.
At the same time, the private prison companies who wanted to move faster and build more with less restrictions would do the same thing, also saw Homan as an ally. And so I think it can't be discounted how much more aggressive he's become in terms of supporting hard-line policies, but he's also a very skilled politician. I think those two things together are why he's in the position he is now.
DETROW: Any sense, given all that, what you're looking for over the next few weeks in Minneapolis with him now in charge?
DICKERSON: He's going to be taking direct orders from the president and from Stephen Miller, as long as Stephen Miller remains in the very influential position that he's in now. So there's a lot of shifting happening right now, and I'm really reminded of - in this moment of the period when public opinion turned against that first family separation policy. And it's easy to forget, but you actually, in a very short period of time, went from even Republicans in Congress supporting that policy to people like Ted Cruz declaring that it should be illegal. Up until now, it's been Stephen Miller, but I think that does seem to be in question because the administration is seeing how much trouble listening to Miller has gotten them in when it comes to public opinion.
DETROW: That is Caitlin Dickerson, reporter at The Atlantic. Thank you so much.
DICKERSON: Thanks, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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