“The Weight He Carries: Tom Homan’s Fight for the Border and the Souls He Can’t Forget”
The voice that answered the microphone wasn’t political. It was weary, gravelly, and raw — the kind of voice shaped by years of radio calls, emergency briefings, and midnight knock-on-the-door missions.
In an exclusive interview with The Alex Marlow Show in Washington, D.C., Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s Border Czar and one of America’s most battle-tested immigration enforcers, opened up about why he keeps fighting.
For Homan, the border isn’t an abstract debate. It’s a graveyard of faces, stories, and memories that never leave him.
“If they held the dead children I’ve held,” he said quietly, “they’d understand why I do what I do.”
A Life at the Line
Tom Homan’s career began long before border politics became a daily talking point on cable news.
In 1984, he joined the U.S. Border Patrol, a young officer stationed along desolate stretches of desert and scrubland in Texas. Over the next four decades, he rose through the ranks of what would eventually become the Department of Homeland Security, serving under six presidents — from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.
He wasn’t a partisan crusader; he was a cop’s cop. Colleagues describe him as tough, blunt, and incorruptible — the kind of man who could stare down cartel smugglers one day and brief the President of the United States the next.
By the time Trump entered the White House in 2017, Homan had already retired once. He’d done his part, or so he thought. But when Trump called, he didn’t hesitate.
“It’s hard to say no to the president when he asks you to fix something that’s killing thousands of people,” Homan told Marlow. “I knew the hate was coming. I knew the threats would follow. But how do you walk away from saving lives?”
A Job That Follows You Home
When Homan speaks of “thousands of lives,” he’s not exaggerating.
The border he’s patrolled is a living crime scene — a theater of human trafficking, cartel warfare, and political indifference. Over his career, he’s seen children die of heatstroke in steel trailers, families suffocate in sealed vans, and women sold into slavery before ever crossing U.S. soil.
The stories spill from him like confession.
“I’ve held a five-year-old boy who baked to death in the back of a truck,” he said.
“I’ve talked to little girls — nine years old — who were raped by their handlers. I’ve seen smugglers rip bodies apart over drug payments. I’ve watched them call a victim’s family and make them listen while they tortured and killed their loved ones because they couldn’t pay.”
Each story seems to take a piece of him.
Homan paused during the interview — his voice breaking for the first time.
“People ask why I came out of retirement. I tell them, because I couldn’t forget. You don’t get to unsee that kind of thing. It becomes who you are.”
The Cost of Conviction
The decision to return to service under Trump wasn’t easy. Homan knew what awaited him: death threats, doxxing, and vilification by activist groups who branded him a “monster” for enforcing the law.
In 2019, his face was plastered across protest banners outside ICE headquarters. Anonymous callers threatened his children. Social media campaigns targeted his home address.
And yet, he stayed.
“I haven’t lived with my family in months,” Homan admitted. “Because of the threats. My wife and kids have been through hell. But they understand the mission. They know why I can’t quit.”
To him, the abuse is proof he’s doing something right.
“If you’re not getting hate for standing up for law and order, you’re probably not standing up hard enough,” he told Marlow.
A Mission Beyond Politics
One of the striking elements of Homan’s testimony is how little of it feels partisan. He’s not quoting talking points or taking swipes at Democrats; he’s talking about bodies.
“You don’t ask a dead kid if their parents were Republican or Democrat,” he said. “You just try to stop it from happening again.”
For years, Homan has warned that open-border policies — often framed as humanitarian — end up fueling the very exploitation they claim to prevent.
He’s seen how cartels adapt instantly to policy changes. When deportations slow, smuggling prices rise. When asylum rules loosen, coyotes advertise new “packages” on social media. And always, it’s the most vulnerable who pay the price.
“Every time a politician says we need compassion at the border, I want to take them down there,” Homan said. “Show them what compassion really looks like when it’s dead in your arms.”
Two Images That Haunt Him
When the conversation turned to specific memories, Homan grew quiet. The words came slower, heavier.
He described a crime scene he’s replayed in his mind for decades — a tractor-trailer in the Arizona desert, doors sealed, temperatures soaring. Inside: nineteen migrants, dead from heat and suffocation.
“When I arrived, some of the bodies had already been pulled out,” he said. “People were clawing at the walls for air. The back door had a small hole where a brake light used to be. They’d been fighting each other just to get a breath.”
He paused again.
“There was a little boy, about five years old, lying in his underwear. His father was cradling him. Both gone. Most of them had stripped down because the metal walls were so hot they burned through their clothes.”
The image still breaks him.
“I’ve seen a lot, but that one stays,” he said softly. “That little boy — he’s why I came back.”
The Nine-Year-Old Girl
The second memory is even harder for him to tell. He speaks of a nine-year-old girl rescued from a cartel safehouse in Texas. She’d been raped repeatedly on her way to the border.
“She didn’t cry,” Homan said. “She just stared at the floor. You realize this kid’s childhood is gone, and all because someone told her family the border was open, that she’d be safe in America. The people who told them that are the ones who should be in jail.”
Homan’s fury is quiet but absolute. For him, border security isn’t about fences or politics — it’s about breaking the machinery that feeds on human suffering.
“You stop this by enforcing the law. Period,” he said. “If we make it hard to cross illegally, they’ll stop trying. If we make it easy, more will die. It’s not complicated.”
The Toll of a Mission Without Rest
Even off duty, Homan carries the border with him. Friends say he rarely sleeps more than four hours a night. He spends his weekends briefing sheriffs, mentoring young ICE agents, and meeting with victims’ families.
“He’s haunted, but it drives him,” said a former colleague. “He feels like if he stops, the people he couldn’t save die twice — once there, and once in his memory.”
When asked whether the job ever gets easier, Homan shook his head.
“You never get used to it,” he said. “If you do, you’ve lost your soul.”
Standing Alone in the Crossfire
Since rejoining the Trump administration, Homan has become both a symbol and a target — lionized by conservatives who see him as the last line of defense, and vilified by progressives who view him as the enforcer of a cruel system.
He’s been shouted down at college lectures, disinvited from conferences, and attacked online by activists who’ve never been south of San Antonio.
Yet, Homan remains unmoved.
“I don’t care what they call me,” he said. “I care about that little girl, that boy in the truck, those people dying in the desert. They can call me names all day. I’ll still be here tomorrow doing the same thing.”
A Soldier’s Faith
Beneath the tough exterior, there’s something else — a hint of quiet faith.
Homan talks about prayer not as ritual but as survival. Many agents, he says, start their shift the same way — not praying to live through it, but praying to do what’s right when it matters.
“You see that much death, you either lose faith or find it,” he said. “I found mine in the middle of hell.”
He keeps a worn rosary from his mother in his office drawer and another in his truck — both reminders, he says, that even lawmen need grace.
A Nation Divided, A Mission Undeterred
Despite the political wars raging in Washington, Homan believes most Americans want the same thing — safety, order, and compassion grounded in realism.
“This isn’t left or right,” he said. “It’s life or death. We can argue all day about politics, but the border doesn’t care who you voted for. It’ll take your life just the same.”
Part 1 Summary
For Tom Homan, the border isn’t a policy — it’s a promise.
A promise to the children he couldn’t save, to the agents who never came home, and to the families who still believe the border is just a line on a map.
When he stands beside President Trump today, he’s not thinking about politics. He’s thinking about a five-year-old boy who died gasping for air, and a nine-year-old girl whose silence still echoes louder than words.
“People ask how I can do this job,” Homan said. “I ask how anyone can walk away.”
“Haunted by the Border: Tom Homan’s War for America’s Conscience”
The lights in the Washington studio dimmed as Tom Homan finished his story. For a long moment, even The Alex Marlow Show’s crew didn’t speak. The silence said everything.
Homan didn’t look for sympathy. He didn’t sell anger. What came through was something far heavier — a man who has seen too much and refuses to look away.“If you wore my shoes for three and a half decades,” he said softly, “you wouldn’t ask why I do this. You’d ask how I’ve managed to stay sane.”
The Faces Behind the Numbers
In most political debates, “border security” is just a talking point — a soundbite tossed across cable news panels. But for Homan, the phrase is a ledger of tragedy. Every statistic hides a name, a family, a body.
Over his 35 years in the field, he’s seen how the machinery of illegal immigration grinds people down — how families sell everything for a chance at safety, only to be swallowed by the same system that promised them hope.
“It’s not just the drugs,” he said. “It’s the lies. Cartels tell these people they’ll get a better life. What they really get is exploitation. Rape. Death in the desert.”
He described a grim rhythm that repeats every week:
migrant caravans moving north, smugglers advertising “safe crossings” on social media, border patrol agents finding bodies near Eagle Pass or Yuma.Sometimes, it’s children.
Sometimes, it’s entire families — dead from dehydration, their names written only in case files.“When politicians in Washington argue about compassion,” Homan said, “I think about those kids clawing at trailer walls for air. I think about the mothers who never knew their children made it that far north. That’s what compassion looks like when it dies.”
The Second Call from Trump
After retiring in 2018, Homan thought he was finished. He’d written his reports, trained new officers, given testimony before Congress. He’d done his time. But when President Donald Trump called him again in early 2025, he didn’t hesitate.
“He said, ‘Tom, I need you back,’” Homan recalled. “I told him, ‘Sir, you know what that means for me and my family.’ He said, ‘Yeah. I also know you’re the only one who can do this right.’”
Trump’s trust in Homan runs deep. During his first term, Homan was instrumental in implementing “Remain in Mexico” and the construction of new border wall segments in Texas and Arizona. His strategies, though controversial, were credited with reducing illegal crossings by nearly 70% in 2019.
This time, Trump wanted him to finish what he’d started — not just to enforce the border, but to expose what he calls “the industry of chaos” that profits from illegal immigration.
“He told me, ‘Tom, this isn’t just about walls. It’s about stopping evil,’” Homan said. “And he’s right. You stop one truck, you save a life. You stop one cartel, you stop a thousand rapes. That’s not policy. That’s war.”
The Hate That Comes with Duty
But war has consequences, and Homan has paid them all.
He’s been doxxed online, his personal address leaked by activists. Protestors have stood outside his home with bullhorns. His wife has received threats through anonymous calls. His children have lived under private security protection.
“The first time someone threatened to kill me, I shrugged it off,” Homan said. “The tenth time, it got to my wife. She cried and said, ‘Why can’t you let someone else do it?’”
He looked down before finishing the thought.
“Because someone else might not.”
Homan admits he’s hardened over the years — not emotionally numb, but disciplined. He no longer reacts to insults. He doesn’t read hate mail. He doesn’t bother defending himself on social media.
“I don’t care what they call me — racist, fascist, whatever,” he said. “I sleep at night because I know how many lives we’ve saved.”
The Politics of the Border
When asked about the political divide over immigration, Homan doesn’t mince words.
“You can’t fix the border if your goal is to win votes instead of save lives,” he said. “Too many politicians treat migrants like props and border agents like villains.”
He blames decades of inaction — by both parties — for what he calls the “normalized humanitarian crisis.”
“Republicans talk tough, Democrats talk compassion. Meanwhile, smugglers talk business. They’re the only ones winning.”
Homan believes that under Trump, for the first time in years, the federal government is treating border enforcement as a national survival issue, not a political one.
He pointed to Trump’s 2025 executive orders — increasing penalties for human trafficking, expanding technology surveillance along high-risk corridors, and reinstating detention policies that critics call harsh but he calls “honest.”
“You can’t deter crime with kindness,” Homan said. “You deter it by consequences. Every illegal entry should have one — immediate removal. You do that, the flow stops overnight.”
A Father’s Perspective
Off camera, Homan is a father and grandfather. The hardest part of his mission, he says, is explaining to his own family why he’s still doing this after all he’s seen.
“My grandkids ask why people call me mean,” he said. “I tell them, ‘Because I make bad people mad.’ They laugh, but that’s the truth.”
When he visits schools or speaks at town halls, he carries a small photo of the five-year-old boy found dead in that trailer years ago. It’s worn around the edges — creased, faded, almost ghostly.
He never names the child publicly. He just shows the picture, then pauses.
“This,” he tells the crowd, “is what an open border looks like.”
The Turning Point
The tragedy that changed him most, however, wasn’t one he witnessed in the field. It came during a briefing at ICE headquarters in 2010, when he learned that a 27-year-old Border Patrol agent named Brian Terry had been murdered during an operation in Arizona.
“That hit me hard,” Homan said. “I’d trained with Brian. He was a kid who believed in the mission. When I saw the report, I just sat there thinking, ‘We keep burying heroes, and Washington keeps arguing about walls.’”
That day, he swore that if he ever had the power to change the system, he would — even if it made him the most hated man in D.C.
“I promised myself no more excuses. Every delay costs lives — sometimes the lives of the people trying to protect this country.”
The Moral Crossroads
Homan’s critics often paint him as cold — the bureaucrat who defends deportations and border crackdowns. But in private moments, he’s anything but.
He’s carried out rescues in the desert himself, given his own water to migrants left to die, and paid for funeral arrangements out of pocket when families couldn’t.
“I can care about people and still enforce the law,” he said. “Those two things aren’t opposites. They’re what make America work.”
He’s convinced that America’s border crisis isn’t just about policy — it’s about morality.
“We either protect our laws or we abandon them,” he said. “If we abandon them, we stop being America.”
A Nation’s Conscience
For Homan, the debate over border enforcement has become a mirror reflecting something deeper about the country itself — its empathy, its discipline, and its will to survive.
He worries that compassion has been redefined to mean permission, and that moral clarity has been replaced by emotional politics.
“We’ve lost the ability to say no,” he said. “We call it cruel to stop someone from crossing illegally. But what’s crueler — stopping them at the river, or letting them die in the desert?”
His frustration is palpable, but so is his faith in the country he’s served for nearly four decades.
“I still believe Americans want the right thing,” he said. “They just don’t always see what’s happening. If they did, this would stop tomorrow.”
The Burden He Refuses to Drop
Every time Homan visits the border, he walks the terrain slowly — sometimes alone, sometimes with agents. He says he can still smell the dust, the sweat, the metallic tang of fear that hangs in the air after a rescue or a raid.
“People ask when I’ll retire for good,” he said. “I tell them when there are no more kids dying down there.”
Until then, he keeps a go-bag packed — a few clothes, his rosary, and a stack of case files that remind him why he can’t stop.
“I’ve been called every name there is,” he said. “But I’ll take it, if it means one less little boy suffocates in a trailer.”
The Line That Defines Him
Before the interview ended, Alex Marlow asked Homan a final question: “After everything you’ve seen — the violence, the hate, the politics — what keeps you going?”
Homan didn’t hesitate.
“Those kids,” he said. “The ones nobody remembers. I can’t save the ones I lost, but I can fight for the next ones. That’s enough reason to wake up every morning.”
He looked up, eyes steady.
“And I’ll keep fighting until the border’s secure or I’m not breathing.”
Epilogue: The Man Who Stayed
As Homan walked out of the studio that afternoon, the city outside was buzzing — traffic, chatter, headlines. Washington moves fast. But the man who walked through it did not.
He moved like someone carrying the weight of a thousand stories that can’t be told in press releases or policy memos — the kind of stories that change the meaning of words like duty and mercy.
He has no illusions about how history will remember him.
He doesn’t need statues or speeches. Just results.“I don’t need to be liked,” he said. “I just need to make sure that when a father carries his child across that desert, they both make it out alive — or don’t have to make that walk at all.”
For Tom Homan, the fight for America’s border isn’t about politics. It’s about peace — the kind that comes only when the voices of the dead finally go quiet.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.