Tom Homan Goes Global: How One Man’s Deportation Fetish Became the World’s Favorite Spectator Blood-Sport

Tom Homan, the human handcuff who once served as Donald Trump’s deportation czar, is back in the headlines like a recurring rash. To much of the planet, the name conjures the same shiver you get when an airline pilot cheerfully announces “a brief holding pattern.” From the favelas of Rio to the refugee camps outside Gaziantep, people recognize the face: square-jawed, buzz-cut, the eternal gym teacher who insists the rope climb is character-building. Only now the rope is a policy lasso, and the gym is the United States.

Homan’s resurrection matters far beyond U.S. borders because migration is the world’s favorite spectator blood-sport. While European leaders publicly cluck over “shared values,” they quietly outsource pushbacks to Tunisian militias and Moroccan riot police. Watching Washington trot out Homan again is like seeing Manchester United re-sign a striker famous only for red cards: the rest of the league takes notes, and the betting markets twitch. If the richest country on earth decides that cruelty is a growth industry, poorer nations suddenly feel licensed to upgrade their own brutality suites—now with 20% more plausible deniability!

Consider the optics in three time zones. In Lagos, the nightly news runs split-screen footage: Homan vowing “the largest deportation operation in history” beside Nigerian migrants shackled in ICE charter seats. In Warsaw, the ruling party slaps the clip into campaign ads: See, even America agrees fences work. Meanwhile, in Beijing, bureaucrats update their PowerPoint titled “Western Hypocrisy: Case Studies.” The Mandarin caption under Homan’s scowling visage reads, approximately, “When they do it, it’s law and order; when we do it, it’s genocide.” You can almost hear the slideshow click forward.

Homan himself is a marvel of ideological elasticity. During the Obama years he accepted a “prosecutorial discretion” memo the way a vegan accepts free-range eggs: not thrilled, but professionally hungry. Once Trump arrived, he transmogrified into avenging angel, praising family separation as a deterrent with the serene confidence of a man who has never misplaced a toddler. Now he’s auditioning for a second Trump act the way aging rockers reunite for “the farewell to the farewell tour.” International observers note the pattern: yesterday’s technocrat is tomorrow’s zealot, depending on which autograph line is longer.

The global economic subplot is equally farcical. Remittances—the $540 billion annual life-support system that keeps entire countries from keeling over—are suddenly hostage to one man’s promise to “unleash ICE.” El Salvador’s president, never one to miss a branding opportunity, has already offered to build “deportee resorts,” presumably with infinity pools overlooking chain-link. Guatemala’s congress, ever subtle, passed an emergency bill to classify incoming deportees as “international investment.” Somewhere a consultant is billing by the hour to turn human misery into an ESG metric.

Europe, of course, watches with the smug relief of a neighbor whose house fire is still across the street. Yet EU officials might recall that when Washington sneezes, Brussels develops chronic sinusitis. The last time America bulk-ordered deportation flights, airlines jacked up charter prices worldwide; within weeks, Frontex was haggling over the same rickety jets like Black Friday shoppers fighting over flat-screens. The market for airborne despair is surprisingly small, and everyone ends up on the same tarmac eventually.

And so we arrive at the inevitable conclusion: Tom Homan is less a person than a global weather system—part cyclone, part hot air. Countries that congratulate themselves on being “not-America” often discover they’re merely downwind. Whether he returns to formal power or simply haunts cable news green rooms, the Homan Doctrine—export your problems, moralize about sovereignty, monetize the fallout—has already metastasized. The rest of us are left updating our passports, our cynicism, and our travel insurance. Because if history teaches anything, it’s that when one nation reverts to muscle memory, the rest start flexing in sympathy. And nobody stretches before that particular workout.