The Man Profiting Off the Immigration and ‘Border Invasion’ Lies

by The Border Chronicle / Times of San Diego / October 23, 2024

For a retired federal employee, Tom Homan, an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, is a very busy man. For the last year, he’s crisscrossed the country with a team of former state and federal law enforcement officers, who call themselves Border911, speaking in theaters and event halls from Phoenix, Arizona, to Mission, Texas, to Ronkonkoma, New York, to promote the propaganda that the U.S.-Mexico border is under invasion and that President Joe Biden and his allies are admitting “llegal aliens” so that Democrats will “be in power for years to come.”

Homan, the president and CEO of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc., and his group’s members have largely flown under the radar, receiving little coverage outside of right-wing media. But if Trump were to win this November, Homan, the architect of Trump’s family separation initiative, and his allies could receive prominent posts. Trump already promised at a rally this summer that he is “bringing back” Homan in 2025.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan vowed during a July immigration panel in Washington, D.C. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

The mission of Homan’s tax-exempt Border911 Foundation, formed in Virginia in October 2023, is to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border,” according to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings. But, by promoting disinformation about a “border invasion” of “illegal immigrants,” Homan’s Border911, the nickname he often uses for the foundation, is helping to lay the groundwork for challenging November’s election if the results don’t favor Trump.

Border911 remains linked to a 501(c)(4) group, called The America Project, a major funder of election conspiracy efforts. Unlike a 501(c)(3) charity, 501(c)(4)s can legally support political campaigns, and they are sometimes referred to as “dark money” organizations because they aren’t required under U.S. tax law to reveal their donors. However, they lack one important advantage of a 501(c)(3)–their donors’ contributions are not tax-deductible. (Homan also in 2023 created another 501(c)(4) he called Border911 Inc.)

Border911 Foundation, and its members, identified on its website, are promoting extremist policies, such as declaring an invasion at the border, to elected leaders and law enforcement officials and falsely portraying the country as beset by voter fraud, according to a joint investigation by a multistate team of journalists from Lighthouse Reports, the Texas Observer, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, and palabra based on dozens of interviews, attendance of various Border911 events, and reviews of public records, videos, speeches, and social media posts.

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