Will a new leader for ICE operations quiet tensions in Minnesota?

0:00It didn't take long for President Trump's tone to change. A day and a half after he reported positive conversations with Minnesota Governor Tim Walls and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry, the president posted on his social media site that the mayor is, quote, all caps, playing with fire. This is because Fry told Tom Homan in a Tuesday meeting the city refuses to enforce federal immigration laws. Homan is the Trump administration's border czar, and he was sent to Minnesota to bring down the temperature weeks into an ICE operation that has become a national conversation and tension point and has left two American citizens dead.

0:35You know, we have Tom Homan there now. We put him in there. He's great. And they met with the governor, the mayor, everybody else, and we're going to de-escalate a little bit. Homan replaces Greg Bovino, who until Monday had been overseeing the operation. Trump's border czar has worked for Democratic and Republican presidents, and was the architect of Trump's family separation policy in his first term. Consider this. After the shooting of Alex Preddy, the Trump administration is making a leadership change on the ground in Minneapolis. Will anything change?

1:09From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. This message comes from TED Talks Daily, the podcast from TED. Curious how to introduce yourself so you actually get hired? or why people are starting to sound like ChatGPT, there's a TED Talk for that. Listen to TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts.

1:37It's Consider This from NPR. Can a leadership shuffle do anything to meaningfully change the situation in Minneapolis? That is the first question we put to reporter Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, who's been covering Tom Homan's career for years. 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? 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.

2:20I 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.

3:00And 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. That's what I was curious about what you thought, because whether it's 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?

3:36Hard 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, Jay Johnson, told me that Johnson rejected the idea because he thought it was inhumane.

4:15Holman 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. 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.

4:58Did 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? 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.

5:40But I think he did understand that it was an unpopular policy and so tried to sort of shift the narrative afterward. So that's an important thing to know about him when it comes to policies that he has pushed for and helped orchestrate. One other thing that's gotten a lot of attention over the last few years is his financial dealings, the many ways in which his political life has intersected with his financial interests. What do we need to know about that? So there's a longstanding revolving door, people call it, between high-ranking roles in the Department of Homeland Security, and in particular, the private prison companies that make billions of dollars on detaining immigrants across the country.

6:19You often have people who retire from these high-level roles at ICE and DHS into high-ranking roles at these private companies that are then negotiating with, you're essentially negotiating with your former colleagues, colleagues who may want to retire themselves into these roles at private companies later. And so people have raised questions about whether that creates an environment for dubious dealmaking, for the government maybe not holding these private contractors to account to the degree that they should, because government officials might be looking for jobs in the future themselves. So Tom Homan, when he left government, he formed during the Biden administration, a consulting company.

7:01And online, he bragged about playing an important role in tens of millions of dollars, he said, in federal contracts being awarded to his private clients. So basically serving as a middleman between the federal officials he knew very well and the private prison company officials he knew very well, as well as perhaps other types of private contractors that we don't know about because he didn't publish a list of all of the deals he supposedly brokered. But he was very open about helping to support and facilitate these deals. And then it came out last year that he was actually involved in a sting operation with the DOJ.

7:39Yeah, the basic facts of it were that undercover FBI agents allegedly offered him$50 ,000 in bribe money. They said he accepted it. He denies this. The Department of Justice closed the bribery case. And the White House press secretary, Caroline Leavitt, when this all came out, characterized all of that as entrapment. She did. And you really have to question that description, given what we've since seen from the FBI and the Department of Justice in general and how politics have influenced their work. You know, we're talking about somebody who's been in law enforcement since he was in his 20s. Tom Homan was a local police officer before he moved into the Border Patrol at 23 years old.

8:21Accepting a bag with$50 ,000 in cash is something that I think even a very new law enforcement officer knows is untoward and likely to raise questions about ethics, if not be outright illegal. And so I think there's some real spin going on there in terms of trying to give Holman the benefit of the doubt, saying that he wasn't trapped or that perhaps he didn't know any better. I don't think that's really a plausible response to somebody who's spent a lifetime in law enforcement in the way that he has. 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.

9:09That 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? 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 has 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 hardliner 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.

10:05At 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 hardline 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. Any sense, given all of that, what you're looking for over the next few weeks in Minneapolis with him now in charge? 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.

10:45So 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. That is Caitlin Dickerson, reporter at The Atlantic.

11:24Thank you so much. Thanks, Scott. This episode was produced by Karen Zamora and Vincent Acavino. It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Sarah Handel. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

11:39It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Dutrow.