What specific Project 2025 immigration recommendations align with Tom Homan’s prior ICE record?
Executive summary
Tom Homan’s public record at ICE and his role as a Project 2025 contributor show clear, documentable overlaps: both emphasize expansive arrests and removals, a dramatic increase in detention capacity, and a roll-back of legal and procedural constraints on immigration enforcement (e.g., limiting sensitive‑site protections and asylum access) [1] [2] [3]. Where reporting allows, Homan’s on‑the‑record vows to “run the biggest deportation force” and to target non‑criminal undocumented immigrants line up closely with Project 2025’s calls for mass arrests, workplace sweeps, and prioritizing detention and removal capacity [1] [4] [5] [6].
1. Tom Homan’s enforcement record and rhetoric
Homan served as acting ICE director in 2017–2018 and has repeatedly promised and pursued aggressive enforcement: under his tenure ICE increased arrests (including of non‑criminals) and he publicly pledged a much larger deportation push, saying he intended to “run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen” [1] [4]. Reporting also documents that Homan has advocated shifting ICE priorities to include non‑criminal undocumented people and has portrayed broad, nationwide arrest operations as desirable and feasible [5] [1].
2. Project 2025’s immigration prescriptions at a glance
Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation‑linked blueprint that Homan contributed to — explicitly recommends mass deportation strategies, reassigning investigative resources to immigration offenses, resuming mass worksite raids, expanding detention capacity dramatically (to as many as 100,000 beds), and removing administrative checks that the plan says “obstruct” ICE operations [2] [3] [7]. It also proposes reorganizing or dismantling DHS functions, loosening restrictions on enforcement in sensitive locations, and using military or National Guard assets to supplement enforcement [7] [6] [3].
3. Concrete policy overlaps: detention, arrests, and targeting non‑criminals
The clearest, most specific overlaps are measurable: Project 2025’s demand to massively increase detention beds and ICE funding corresponds with Homan’s public advocacy for expanded detention and hiring of officers and his leadership role in campaigns to scale up arrests and removals [2] [8] [9]. Likewise, Project 2025’s push for workplace raids and broader domestic sweeps matches Homan’s record of supporting sweeps that expanded arrests of people without criminal records — a spike contemporaneous reporting attributes to enforcement priorities like those he championed [4] [6].
4. Institutional and legal alignment: removing constraints and centralizing power
Project 2025’s structural prescriptions — dissolving or reshaping DHS offices that provide legal oversight, eliminating watchdog or procedural constraints, and empowering agencies to operate in “sensitive zones” and nationwide without traditional limits — echo Homan’s affiliations and rhetoric favoring aggressive, less‑constrained enforcement [2] [3] [6]. Homan’s move from ICE into Heritage/Project 2025 circles and his later role as a White House “border czar” reinforce how his personal trajectory embodies the blueprint’s aim to place hardline enforcement figures in control [1] [7] [10].
5. Where alignment is less direct, contested, or legally fraught
Some Project 2025 proposals — such as widespread use of active‑duty military for arrests or wholesale abolition of DHS — are broad institutional gambits that go beyond day‑to‑day ICE management and raise unresolved legal and logistical questions; reporting links Homan to the project and its goals but does not show him authoring every element, so attribution should be cautious [7] [1]. Critics and civil‑rights groups also frame the Project as an ideological blueprint with broader agendas (e.g., curtailing asylum and certain visas), and those hidden agendas — advanced by the Heritage Foundation and allied actors — shape the recommendations Homan has promoted, a point raised by advocacy groups and legal analyses [11] [12]. Finally, while contemporaneous reporting documents increases in arrests and detention under administration officials aligned with Project 2025, the feasibility and legal defensibility of mass deportation schemes remain disputed in courts and policy analyses, a limitation reflected in sources that warn about resource constraints and litigation risks [2] [12].