With his election as “border czar,” Trump shows he is ready to remake the Fox News White House

new York
CNN
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When Tom Homan left U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2018, he didn't stray far from Donald Trump's administration — he joined Fox News as a paid contributor and used the platform to advocate for aggressive border control.

Now, in a full-circle moment, the immigration hardliner is leaving Fox and rejoining Trump as the president-elect prepares to take office again.

“I love Fox, I love the family there, but I think the calling is clear. I have to go back and help,” Homan said on “Fox & Friends” Monday morning, hours after Trump announced on his Truth Social account that Homan would be “in charge of our nation’s borders.”

Homan is the first Fox News personality to join the currently-forming Trump administration, and he likely won't be the last. Trump is a loyal Fox viewer, despite his occasional social media posts and comments criticizing the right-wing network, and he has hired TV personalities he likes in the past.

Homan definitely fits this description. He was hired to head ICE's deportation division during the Obama administration and was named acting director of the agency when Trump took over in 2017.

When Homan became a Fox contributor, he was a regular presence on the network's morning and prime-time shows. “They're basically portraying him as some kind of border patrol superstar,” said Juliet Jeske, a researcher who leads Decoding Fox News, a project that examines the network's programming.

Homan was so popular at Fox that Jeske said she had a file dedicated to him. Fox acted “as if it were their job to promote him to Trump’s next administration,” Jeske said. “It wasn’t subtle.”

Trump specifically told “Fox & Friends” co-host Lawrence Jones in a January interview that Homan would be an important part of his border control plan.

While the revolving door between television and government is a bipartisan and often criticized phenomenon, it never stopped rotating during Trump's first term. Between 2017 and 2020, there were 20 known cases of Fox switching to Trump, including Anthony Scaramucci, Richard Grenell, Heather Nauert, Morgan Ortagus and Bill Shine.

After President Joe Biden took office, Homan became an outspoken critic of the Democratic administration.

“I've been on this network for years complaining about what the government has done to this border,” Homan said during his appearance Monday. “I yelled and screamed about it and told them what they needed to do to fix it.”

“Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade said during the segment that Homan worked with Trump “to develop his job description,” which Trump referred to as “border czar.”

“Congratulations to you. It’s bad for us, we lose you as a contributor,” Kilmeade commented.

Homan will no longer be a Fox employee starting Monday, a network spokesperson confirmed to CNN.

On Sunday morning, Homan was still seen as a paid employee on Fox, talking to presenter Maria Bartiromo about Trump's plans for mass deportations – and criticizing the media.

“I read stories about 'concentration camps' all the time. ICE has the highest detention standards in the industry,” Homan said. “These people will be well taken care of. It will be a humane operation, but it is a necessary mass deportation.”

On Monday, he was back on the air as the expected Trump appointee, live from the same location, talking about the same topic – underscoring how thin the line is between the pro-Trump media and the emerging Trump administration. The only big difference on Monday was that he wore a tie.