For many of his admirers, it seems like Tom Homan was destined to be America’s Border Czar. His no-nonsense approach and tough-as-nails demeanor make him the perfect person to calmly lay out the process of solving America’s migrant and border crises while deflecting the criticism of how he gets the job done. Yet, as with so many successful people, Tom Homan found his calling in a chance encounter- during a fishing trip, of all things. Reagan Reese is the White House correspondent for the Daily Caller. Reese explained on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program how Homan had a whole different definition of “catch and release” on his mind by the end of that trip.
Reese told host Larry Mendte that a border patrol agent in the right place at the right time convinced Homan that his future was as a border patrol agent: “It all begins in 1984, when he was a cop up in New York, in upstate New York and he went fishing on the St. Lawrence River. It’s a river he’d gone fishing on many times when he was a kid. He went with a couple of his cop friends, and there they saw a border patrol agent docking on a nearby bay, and that border patrol agent stopped to talk to them, and by the end of that conversation Tom knew he wanted to be a border patrol agent, and a couple of months later he was. He worked for President Reagan; that would be the first of six Presidents he would work for."
It wouldn't be the only chance encounter that dictated the path of Homan’s career. In fact, Reese says it was a phone call at his retirement party that he almost passed up that re-wrote history again: “He was at his retirement party at Obama’s DHS, shaking hands with his colleagues when his chief of staff runs in and says, ‘Hey, you have an emergency phone call in your office.’ His office is all packed and boxed up, he’s like, okay, guess I can take one more phone call. It was Trump’s incoming DHS Secretary, John Kelly, telling Tom that the President-elect, Donald Trump, wanted him to come back and run ICE. And so, Tom took the weekend to think about it- he’d already kind of accepted that retirement gig- and on Monday he said, okay, I’ll come back.”
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