Donald Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, and far-right media personality Tucker Carlson talked about a bizarre range of extremist and racist conspiracy theories in an interview just weeks before Homan took office and was trusted with implementing a wide-ranging crackdown on migrants.
The conversation included Carlson’s claim that Mexican cartels come “from cultures that have practiced human sacrifice for thousands of years”, connected the racist “great replacement” theory to Biden’s immigration policy, and advocated the arrest of elected US leaders who opposed Donald Trump’s policies on migrants.
On immigration policy, Homan expressed a desire to get the Department of Defense to assist with “intelligence” and “targeting” domestically and took the view that Immigration and Border Enforcement (Ice) should arrest “a mayor or a governor” that “harbored” immigrants in sanctuary cities.
Meanwhile, Homan faces questions over the network of associations he built up in his non-profit work during the interval between his appointment in the first Trump administration and his new White House role.
While the interview has been fleetingly reported previously, the details of Homan’s conspiracy theory-laden conversation with Carlson have not.
With Trump’s deportation efforts seeing Ice agents attempting to take enforcement actions in schools, colleges and workplaces around the US, Homan’s business dealings and extremist political views have come under scrutiny as the public face of the nationwide crackdown.
UN ‘pulling’ Biden’s ‘strings’
In the podcast interview, recorded for Carlson’s online show and published to X, YouTube and other platforms on 18 December, Homan painted Biden’s border policy as a “great replacement”-style effort to flood the country with potential Democratic voters, and both men characterized the previous administration’s immigration policy as the outcome of a conspiracy involving NGOs, religious charities and the UN.
At one point, Homan accused the Biden administration of having deliberately worked to “unsecure the border”.
Carlson asked: “What do you think the goal was?”
Homan responded: “I think they see a future political benefit. I think they think these people will be future Democratic voters.
“But we don’t even have to get there, Tucker,” added Homan, saying that Biden’s census rules allowed “all these illegal aliens to be counted in sanctuary cities, which is going to result in more seats in the house for the Dems”.
While the idea that an elite was conspiring to orchestrate mass immigration for political gain at the ballot box was mostly confined to the white supremacist racist far right for decades, in recent years “great replacement”-style conspiracy theories such as this have increasingly been voiced by mainstream conservatives and Republicans.
Later in their conversation, Homan and Carlson sought to extend the purported conspiracy theory well beyond the Biden administration. Carlson suggested a wide-ranging plot involving international bodies such as the UN and NGOs and Homan responded by calling for an investigation.
Homan said: “I think under the Trump administration there needs to be an investigation.”
He revealed that “I’ve had numerous conversations with Mark Green, who is the head of homeland oversight.” Green is a Tennessee Republican who chairs the House’s homeland security committee and is an ex-officio member of the oversight, investigations and accountability committee, which has oversight over the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.
Homan said Green “plans on having some oversight hearings on this when it comes to the NGOs. I think they were complicit.”
He then asserted without evidence that “certainly the United Nations were south of our border, working on this global illegal immigration to the United States”.
Homan rounded out the conspiracy theory, saying: “This was by design. Do I think Joe Biden had the expertise to do it? No, I think someone’s pulling his strings.
“This is something that needs to be investigated, people need to be held accountable,” he added.
Cartels ‘have operational control of the south-west border’
The two returned obsessively throughout their conversation to the issue of drug cartels, which they claimed had deprived the US of sovereignty over parts of perhaps five US states and the entire south-west border.
Early in the conversation, Homan stated his basic position on the cartels: they should be “designated terrorist organizations and wiped off the face of the earth”.
Later, Carlson asked Homan about what he said “informed people” had told him: “In parts of New Mexico, Arizona, California, even Florida, Texas, there is real control, in the way they control Mexico.”
In those locations, purportedly, “they’re basically a state within a state, they have their own armored personnel carriers, tanks, you know”. He then asked Homan: “Do you think that’s real, do you think they have that kind of beachhead here?”
“Absolutely,” Homan answered, continuing that “I’ve seen the intelligence reports, they have military-grade weapons. It’s not just my opinion, they have control, operational control of the south-west border.”
‘They worship death’
Later in the conversation, Homan and Carlson attributed the cartels’ motivations in part to their worship of “satanic” ideas or “death”, seeking to tie that to their “cultures” which “practice human sacrifice”.
Carlson began by claiming to “know that in El Salvador when MS-13 ran the country, before Bukele, there was a religious component of voodoo witchcraft to MS-13 where they were worshipping the devil openly.”
Nayib Bukele is the authoritarian, populist president of El Salvador, whose promotion of cryptocurrency and brutal crackdown on gangs in the country have won him fans on the “new right” in the US and beyond.
Earlier this month, Marco Rubio met with Bukele in El Salvador, and the latter offered to hold deportees and US citizens alike in its vast network of prisons. That network includes the largest prison in the Americas, built to accommodate 40,000 people, which is around half the number Bukele has locked up since his war on the gangs commenced.
Later in the podcast conversation, Carlson claimed that devil worship was a “component of the cartels, you see it in Mexico as well”, and asked Homan: “Have you come across that?”
“Yeah,” Homan answered. “They worship death.”
“Formally worship it?” Carlson shot back.
“Yeah,” Homan answered. “I won’t call it religious, but even Texas [department of public safety] have found some of these places where the cartels are operating, they got statues there and memorabilia worshipping death as a consequence of not letting them do their business.”
Homan may have been referring to Santa Muerte, a Mexican “folk saint” whose currency among cartel members has been an intermittent focus of US conservative media coverage of crime at the border, and enforcement actions in Mexico, where “the Mexican army, under orders from the Mexican state, has obliterated thousands of shrines dedicated to the folk saint across the country”.
Researchers have found, however, that Santa Muerte devotion is not confined to criminals, and is also found “increasingly [among] police and others involved in law enforcement”.
Carlson appeared to assert that there was a connection between cartels and the historical practice of human sacrifice in some pre-colonial Meso-American cultures, saying: “And these are from cultures that have practiced human sacrifice for thousands of years.”
Homan answered: “I got a video on my phone showing a member of the cartel skinning a man alive.”
He added: “Skinning him alive on video to send a message that if you snitch on the cartels they’re not gonna just kill you, they’re gonna make you suffer immensely.”
‘Why can’t I arrest a mayor or a governor?’
Homan also asserted Ice’s right to arrest elected officials responsible for so-called “sanctuary cities”, which do not cooperate with Ice operations within their boundaries.
He said: “I as an agent … have arrested United States citizens for knowingly harboring an illegal alien in their home.”
He continued: “If I can arrest a US citizen for violating those crimes, why can’t I arrest a mayor or a governor who has given their staff explicit instructions to impede us and to hide from us?”
Homan added: “We need to prosecute these people and send a message that this is unacceptable.”
That is a message Homan has continued to assert since taking office. Last week, Homan warned that the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may “be in trouble” over a webinar about Ice that was hosted by her office.
The congresswoman on Wednesday aired a “Know Your Rights With ICE” webinar on her Facebook page which advised attendees of “trends” of arrests by Ice in New York and explained what rights they have. Ocasio-Cortez did not attend it.
But Homan told Fox News: “So maybe AOC’s gonna be in trouble now, but I need the [office of the attorney general] to opine on that … Impediment is impediment, in my opinion.”
On Friday, Homan and the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, appeared in a joint interview on Fox News, where Adams endorsed a Trump executive order which would allow Ice agents to operate at the city’s Rikers Island jail.
In the Fox and Friends studio, Homan said of Adams and his promises of cooperation: “If he doesn’t come through … I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, Where the hell is the agreement we came to?”
Adams is at the center of a political firestorm after top justice department attorneys in New York and Washington DC resigned in the face of orders to drop their prosecution of the New York mayor over corruption allegations.
Financial entanglements
Like every senior administration appointee to date, Homan is an unstinting supporter of Trump, and a full-throated 2020 election denialist. This, and his espousal of anti-immigrant rhetoric, have led to controversy but also to associations with far-right extremists, and sprawling business relationships that some say present conflicts of interest.
Between his departure from the first Trump administration and his appointment as border czar, a White House role, Homan had stints as a Fox News contributor, was a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and was credited as a contributor in “Mandate for Leadership”, the central document of Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for the second Trump administration.
Apart from these blue ribbon conservative appointments, Homan has involved himself in several interrelated non-profit organizations.
The Border911 Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, was founded in 2023 in Virginia, Homan’s state of residence. At the same time, he also founded Border911 Inc, a 501(c)(4) organization. (501(c)(4)s differ from 501(c)(3)s in that donations to them are not tax-deductible, but they are permitted to engage in electoral advocacy.)
Both the Border911 Foundation and Border911 Inc were spin-offs from the America Project (TAP), a Michael Flynn-founded election-denial non-profit that was reportedly funded to the tune of $27m by rightwing overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.
Homan was reportedly TAP CEO for part of 2023. His appointment to that role occasioned a fundraising gala at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that year.
From early 2024, Homan was out at TAP and focused on the Border911 Foundation and Border Inc, as well as a Trump-endorsed for-profit consultancy Homeland Strategic Consulting LLC, which, Homan boasted, secured “tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts” for his clients.
Throughout the campaign season, the Border911 Foundation was a virtual speaker’s agency for a stable of rightwing anti-immigration activists, many of them former law enforcement officials who appeared at rallies organized by the non-profit or by political candidates, such as Arizona’s Kari Lake, throughout south-western border states.
Previous reporting has highlighted seeming irregularities in tax filings by the non-profits. Coda reported that in 2023, “both of Homan’s Border911 organizations reported almost the same expenses – about $87,000 – but the 501(c)(4) claimed zero revenue”. Non-profit compliance experts expressed concerns to the outlet that “the tax-exempt charity money may have been passed through” the 501(c)(4).
Steve Lentz, an attorney acting as a spokesperson for both Border911 organizations, told Coda that this was due to errors in the filings, “There was an entry in the [501](c)(4) [filing] that shouldn’t have been there,” he said, and said it would be amended.
The Guardian’s review of the filings indicates that amendments were subsequently made.
The Transparency non-profit Accountable.US, however, has raised concerns about what it says is a potential for conflicts of interest arising from the 501(c)(3) non-profit and its board in newly published research.
Partly the worries arise from ambiguities in Homan’s public statements about his relationship with the foundation while he is in office.
Accountable.US says that while Homan has said that he will take a “leave of absence” from Border911, he has also appeared to claim that the non-profit will continue to act as “data-mining site” that will provide “real up-to-date data on anything related to the border”, including “apprehensions”, “ICE arrests” and other information.
And some of the foundation’s board members work for federal government contractors.
Charles Sowell is chair of the Border911 Foundation’s board. He is also the founder and CEO of SE&M Solutions, a security and IT consulting firm that touts its “access to senior leaders in government” and “hopes to secure local and federal contracts using the best experts in the government consulting industry”.
The Border911 Foundation’s director, Mark Hall, meanwhile, is currently the US security lead and chief security officer for Dragados USA, a construction contracting firm, where he claims to lead security for “a $6bn international border crossing construction project” whose cost indicates that it is likely the Gordie Howe international bridge between the US and Canada, which is budgeted for that figure.
While there is no evidence of wrongdoing from these board members, a mass deportation effort on the scale promised by Trump, Homan and other administration immigration hawks such as Stephen Miller could be a bonanza for US government contractors.
Accountable.US fears the worst. Its executive director, Tony Clark, said in a statement: “Homan appears to be using division, fear and chaos in a way to pad his friends’ pockets. Why should anyone believe Homan won’t steer lucrative government contracts to members of his ‘non-profit’ board?”
