Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Update (6/14/19): President Trump announced in a June 14 interview on Fox & Friends that he was hiring Tom Homan back into his administration as a “border czar.” This piece has also been updated with additional information.

Tom Homan, once President Donald Trump’s acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has become a major source of misinformation on Fox News about immigration. Homan associated himself with anti-immigrant bigotry during and after his tenure in government, left a legacy of cruel actions against immigrants, and continued espousing anti-immigrant rhetoric after joining Fox News as a contributor in August 2018.

Homan is a major source of immigration misinformation at Fox

Homan began appearing exclusively on Fox News in the latter months of his leadership of ICE and joined Fox as a contributor after he retired in June 2018. But even before his retreat to Fox, Homan spread and inspired misinformation in conservative media sphere.

Not only has Homan appeared on the network nearly 150 times since August 2017, but Fox hosts also frequently cite him in their discussions on immigration, in interviews with other people, and even base entire segments on his words, marking him as perhaps Fox’s most prominent misinformer on immigration.

Homan has also associated himself with anti-immigrant bigotry

In April 2017, several months after Homan took charge of ICE, he hired an analyst from an anti-immigrant hate group the Center for Immigration Studies as an adviser. Just days before he retired in June 2018, Homan also sat down for an interview at an event CIS hosted, where he dubiously linked sanctuary city policies to the increased security risk for immigration officers and called for changing asylum law to make it harder for asylum-seekers to obtain it.

During his time in government service, Homan reportedly used a slur in his work that glorified violence against immigrants, according to HuffPost.

In September 2018, following his retirement from ICE and the start of his employment at Fox News, Homan attended as a special honoree a conference organized by the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America.

Homan left a reproachful legacy at ICE by spreading fear among and about immigrants and defending Trump’s inhumane policies which led to immigrant deaths in detention

In June 2017, Homan said in congressional testimony all undocumented immigrants “should be afraid” of actions by the Trump administration.

In January 2018, Homan called for criminal charges against local government leaders of so-called sanctuary cities.

In June 2018, Homan defended Trump’s inhumane family separation policy and said “you’d have to put the blame on the parents” for immigration officials taking their children away.

Deportation of immigrants with no criminal convictions nearly tripled under Homan’s first year as acting ICE director, doubling the proportion of noncriminals that made up immigration arrests from 13% in 2016 to 26%.

ICE arrested for deportation several immigration activists, journalists, and ICE critics under Homan’s leadership, spurring accusations of improper politicization of immigration law enforcement.

Homan advocated for detention of migrants past current legal time limit, including for pregnant women.

Under Homan’s leadership, ICE stopped delaying deportations of individuals named in private congressional bills that would give them legal status.

The inspector general office at Department of Homeland Security started inspections of four ICE detention facilities when Homan was still leading ICE and found “immediate risks or egregious violations of detention standards” including “nooses in detainee cells, overly restrictive segregation, inadequate medical care, unreported security incidents, and significant food safety issues.”

ICE reportedly committed numerous other abusive actions against immigrants under Homan’s leadership, including sexually abusing detainees, arresting immigrants who report domestic abuse, and allowing several immigrants to die in detention.

Homan’s extreme anti-immigrant tendencies and defenses of Trump have continued since he joined Fox News

This post was originally published June 12.