Caitlin Dickerson

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 separately.

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.

Homan 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.

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.

But I think he did understand that it was an unpopular policy and so tried to sort of shift the narrative afterward.

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.

You 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 –

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.