Trump’s Former ICE Director Tells CPAC He Doesn’t ‘Give a Shit’ if Families Are Separated at Border

Thomas Homan, who served in the Trump administration as Acting Director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday and defiantly declared, “I don’t give a shit” about criticism of his controversial family separation policy at the southern border.

Homan led ICE from January 2017 to June 2018 and has long made headlines for his bombastic rhetoric. While head of ICE, Homan declared undocumented immigrants “should be afraid” of the Trump administration and responded to criticism of family separation by saying:

The constant story about us separating families … when someone enters this country illegally, or someone overstays their visa, they know they’re in this country illegally. If they take it upon themselves to have a child in this country and becomes a US citizen by birth, he put his family in that position, not ICE, not Border Patrol. And to vilify the men and women of ICE as separating families is unfair.

At CPAC, Homan stuck a very similar tone to those comments from June 2017, as he laid into the Biden administration’s border policies before the conservative political group.

“I wake up every day pissed off because this administration destroyed the most secure border in our lifetime,” Homan said, adding:

And and I’m sick and tired hearing about the family separation, and I’m still being sued over that. So come give me… I don’t give a shit. Right. Bottom line is. We enforced the law.

American families, when I was a cop in New York and I arrest a father for domestic violence, or someone for DUI, I separate that family. When you violate the law with a child, you’re going to be separated.

“But you’re right. 250,000 children have crossed the border since Joe Biden’s been president. They chose to separate themselves and the children aren’t always children,” Homan added.

“Let’s put this perspective. When I was the ICE director under President Trump, we did Operation Matador, a gang enforcement operation in Long Island. We arrested just short of 500 gang members. Most of them MS-13, 42% of them enter the country as a family unit. So the family units, are there some battered family units that come across that border? I get it,” he continued.

“But a lot of the family units aren’t even family units and under the Trump administration, we did DNA testing. What’s the first thing by administration did? Killed DNA. We don’t know how many families are actually families,” Homan added.

Homan, who has been a Fox News contributor since August 2018, has been a flashpoint of controversy in recent years. He made headlines in 2022, when he reportedly showed up at notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, but left the conference before his scheduled speech. Homan reportedly claimed that he backed out of the white nationalist event after reading online that Fuentes had praised Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Watch the full clip above via C-SPAN

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