He Went To A White Supremacist Event. Now He’ll Oversee Trump’s Mass Deportations.

“We are going to have a historic deportation operation,” Tom Homan promised this summer.

In February 2022, Tom Homan went to the Orlando World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, and took a seat among a group of young white supremacists. Homan — who oversaw former President Donald Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant regime as acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and who under former President Barack Obama was responsible for record-high levels of deportations as the head of ICE’s deportation branch — had been invited to speak at the American First Political Action Conference.

As HuffPost first reported at the time, Homan claimed he was unaware of what the AFPAC was all about — his assistant had booked him at the event, he said, and had likely confused America First, the event’s organizer, with another right-wing group. Sitting at the table, waiting for the event to begin, Homan got out his phone and looked up Nick Fuentes, the leader of America First, and came across a bunch of articles labeling him a “white nationalist.” This didn’t prompt Homan to get up and leave. He was skeptical of the label “white nationalist.” After all, he knew what it was like to be unfairly labeled a bigot and a racist during his time overseeing ICE. Maybe Fuentes had suffered the same injustice. But then he read that Fuentes had praised Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Homan got up from the table, leaving the conference before it began.

At the AFPAC, after Homan left, Fuentes praised Adolf Hitler, while other speakers cheered on Putin’s bombing of Ukraine and called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be hanged. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) gave a speech in which she told the assembled white supremacists they had a “responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand for our freedoms, and stop the Democrats, who are the communist party of the United States of America.”

Asked if it inspired any self-reflection that someone like Fuentes — a young, wildly racist and antisemitic leader of the America First “groyper” movement who attended the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — would want him to speak at the AFPAC, Homan demurred. He told HuffPost in a phone interview after the AFPAC that he didn’t know why Fuentes might like him. He had never even met the guy.

A few minutes later, Homan called HuffPost back to make a clarification: “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” he said of Fuentes and the groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know.”