Caitlin Dickerson

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.

So Tom Homan, when he left government, he formed during the Biden administration a consulting company.

And 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.

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.

accepting 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

home in the benefit of the doubt, saying that he was entrapped 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.

So Tom Holman 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.