If you like what the Trump administration has done with mass deportations so far, you’re going to love what comes next, Border Czar Tom Homan told a Baylor University audience April 22.
Homan spoke on the Baylor campus as part of Turning Point USA’s “This Is the Turning Point” tour. Although the event was closed to media and the public, BNG acquired an audio recording of Homan’s interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson from a student source.
“We’re doing great. We’re setting historic records, but we’ve got to do more,” Homan said. “And now we’ve hired, we’re in process of hiring 10,000 new deportation officers, which doubles the size of the deportation force. They think it was good this year. Wait until the next year.”
Tom Homan
Homan identified three priorities of his work: Secure the border, revive mass deportations and “find these 300,000 children that Biden released to unvetted sponsors that were missing.”
The latter point references a controversial claim Homan and President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have made without evidence: That the U.S. government “can’t find” more than 300,000 migrant children and that many have been lured into forced labor and sex trafficking.
While the first Trump administration was well-known for its family separation policy that lost track of thousands of immigrant children taken from their parents, Trump and his allies have turned the tables and accused the Biden administration of something far worse.
According to the BBC, Homan’s claim stems from a 2024 report that said nearly 300,000 immigrant children had not appeared for immigration court hearings — not indicating they are “lost” or being sex trafficked.
“Because of President Trump, we’ve already found 146,000” of the “missing” children, Homan said in Waco. “Some were with families hiding out. They don’t want to be deported, and they don’t want to go to immigration court. But many, too many, were involved in forced sex trafficking and forced labor.
“People want to say this administration’s being inhumane. President Trump has saved thousands of children from sex trafficking and forced labor. This is a great president, the greatest president in my lifetime.”
“President Trump has saved thousands of children from sex trafficking and forced labor.”
Other media outlets and immigration advocacy groups have attempted to figure out what Homan and other Trump officials mean when saying they have “found” missing children and have reported the claims are exaggerated and inaccurate.
Throughout his interview with Johnson, Homan made provocative claims about how the Trump administration — through its aggressive deportation and anti-immigrant crusade — is actually helping save women and children from exploitation.
“The things I’ve seen in my career have changed the man I am,” he said. “I’ve talked to young girls as young as 9 years old that were raped multiple times by members of the cartel to pay for passage coming to the United States. When you get on your knees and you talk to a 9-year-old little girl, and you look in her eyes and everything in her is dead. Her life is ruined forever. Your heart breaks because she would never be the same. That little girl should be playing with dolls and having time for life, but she’ll never be the same because you had grown men crawling on her, taking everything innocent and pure from her.”
He continued: “I’ve stood in the back of a tractor trailer where 19 dead aliens had died, baked to death, including a 5-year-old boy that baked to death and begged his father not to let him die. The other witnesses said he begged his dad, ‘I don’t want to die. I want to see mommy.’ … And when I went to that crime scene, I had a 5-year-old son at the time. That boy was wearing the same underwear my little boy had. That messed me up for a while. Fortunately, we put all those 14 scumbags in prison, got every one of them.”
Homan portrayed the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies as good for immigrants. “People need to understand when you secure the border, you save thousands of lives. Under President Biden, with historic mass illegal immigration, was the most inhumane thing you can do.”
“People need to understand when you secure the border, you save thousands of lives.”
He accused the Biden administration of causing women to be raped and men to be sexually assaulted. “Children were dying over under Biden. Over 4,000 families died making that journey.”
Homan portrayed himself as a defender of women and children who were suffering under the “open border” policy of the Biden administration. “I was pissed off for four years. Every day I woke up and I was thinking to myself, ‘How many children died last night? How many Americans died last night? How many young girls got raped last night? How many billions of dollars did the cartel make?’”
As a lifelong Catholic, he said, the pope and the cardinals who have criticized the Trump administration are “wrong” and “they’re talking about something they don’t understand.”
Homan accused critics of ICE of perpetuating “fake stories.”
“The American people don’t understand what ICE really does because there’s so much false information.”
As for critics in Congress, “If we’re racist for enforcing the law, what’s that make them? They wrote it. We’re not making this stuff up. So you know what? We’ll keep fighting them. We’ll win the message. President Trump wins every day.”
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