Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he would bring Tom Homan, a Project 2025 contributor, into his administration if he wins November’s election.
In a Tuesday appearance on California’s KFI radio station, host John Kobylt asked Trump what plans or proposals related to immigration he had “ready to go” if elected.
“You’ve seen Tom,” the former president replied. “You’ve seen Tom Homan. He’s coming on board.”
Homan served in Trump’s administration from 2017 to 2018 as acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, overseeing the controversial family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border.
When asked whether the former president was considering any other Project 2025 contributors for a role in his administration or transition team, should he be elected in November, Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesperson, told Newsweek: “President Trump announced a Trump-Vance transition leadership group to initiate the process of preparing for what comes after the election.
“But formal discussions of who will serve in a second Trump Administration is premature. President Trump will choose the best people for his Cabinet to undo all the damage dangerously liberal Kamala Harris has done to our country.” Newsweek has contacted the Harris campaign for comment via email
Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to Trump’s campaign, also emphasized that the former president has not endorsed Project 2025.
Alex Brandon and Andrew Harnik/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Homan has also worked for the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025. He is listed as a contributor to the policy document, which proposes mass detention and deportation of undocumented or illegal immigrants in order to “regain control of the border.”
Last year, Homan spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he said he did not care about the family separation controversy.
“I’m sick and tired of hearing about the family separation,” Homan said. “I’m still being sued over that.” He added: “I don’t give a s***, right? Bottom line is, we enforced the law.”
Although Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Project 2025, his own platform shares broad policy similarities with the document. One of the central policies of Trump’s campaign is to carry out “the largest deportation program in American History.”
Homan is one of dozens of former Trump administration officials who worked on Project 2025, an almost 900-page document that contains detailed policy plans for a future Republican administration.
It aims to remove civil service employment protections for thousands of federal employees so they can be fired and replaced with Republican loyalists.
Various critics have described this aspect of Project 2025 as “a significant move to an authoritarian government” and likely to “destroy American democracy.”
Other Project 2025 proposals include implementing sweeping changes to the federal government, including eliminating the Department of Education; lowering corporation tax; ending the Affordable Care Act; reducing the scope of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; rolling back renewable-energy programs to create a regulatory environment that favors the fossil fuel industry; limiting mail-order abortion pills; and removing diversity, equity and inclusion hiring policies from federal programs.
In Project 2025’s foreword, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said the policies represented “the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.”
Newsweek has contacted the Heritage Foundation and Homan for comment via email and online form, respectively.
Trump has repeatedly denied accusation by Democrats that he would implement the policies if elected, saying he is unfamiliar with the policies and has “nothing to do” with the authors, though many of them worked in his administration.
Democrats have suggested that Project 2025 represents a policy blueprint for a second Trump term, and that he is only distancing himself from it before the election because the policies are so unpopular with voters.
In April 2022, Trump gave a keynote speech at the Heritage Foundation, saying of the organization: “This is a great group. And they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming.”
