In 2018, then acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) Thomas Homan told HuffPost that Congress needed to fix immigration laws because: “I’m the first one to say, I can’t arrest 11 million people.”

Now, newly tapped as Donald Trump’s “border czar”, he will be tasked with just that. The president-elect said on Monday that Homan, a former law enforcement official who has served in immigration enforcement under multiple presidencies, would be “in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin”.

Homan has been describing mass deportation in stark terms for the past year, angling for a role in helping Trump with his signature campaign promise. Asked about the high price tag of a mass deportation, he turned the question back on 60 Minutes: “What price do you put on our national security? Is it worth it?” When the outlet followed up to ask if there was a way for mass deportations not to separate families with mixed immigration statuses, Homan responded: “Families can be deported together.”

It is a likely next step for a man who served as acting director of Ice for 16 months under Trump in what was seen as a period of intense controversy for the agency. The Atlantic documented how Homan was the “father” of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, tracing its roots to a 2014 meeting during which Homan pushed the idea. He defended the policy to the outlet by saying: “The goal wasn’t to traumatize. The goal was to stop the madness, stop the death, stop the rape, stop the children dying, stop the cartels doing what they’re doing.”

This year, his speech at the Republican national convention started with a folksy “how you doin’” and a shoutout to New York, his home state. He then launched into an impassioned speech defending Trump and lambasting the Biden administration on immigration, saying Joe Biden’s policies were essentially “national suicide”.

“As a guy who spent 34 years deporting illegal aliens, I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country in violation of federal law: you better start packing now – you’re damn right – because you’re going home,” he said, to raucous applause.

To the cartels in Mexico trafficking fentanyl, he said: “When President Trump gets back in office, he’s going to designate you a terrorist organization. He’s going to wipe you off the face of the earth. You’re done.”

At a convention of national conservatives this year, he said it more plainly, according to Semafor.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

Homan started his law enforcement career as a cop in upstate New York but found it sleepy, HuffPost reported, so he moved to California to work on the border. He served as a border patrol agent for four years and then rose through the ranks of immigration enforcement under six presidencies, starting with Ronald Reagan.

In 2015, when Barack Obama was in office, Homan was given the Presidential Rank award for distinguished service for his work deporting people. A Washington Post profile about him and the award in early 2016 noted that, earlier in his career, he wouldn’t publicly reveal which side he was on in the immigration debate and instead focused on enforcing laws. But, the profile noted, he was “really good” at deporting people.

After his time as acting director of Ice, Homan worked as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the Washington DC thinktank behind Project 2025. He penned op-eds attacking the Biden administration over immigration and panned the bipartisan immigration deal. He wrote in one op-ed that “race-baiting Democrats” had called him names when he led Ice.

“It’s clear that the left will play the race card when it suits them to silence and demonize their opponents and win fleeting political points. But I stopped caring what my critics thought long ago,” he wrote.

Homan is listed as a contributor to Project 2025, though his name is not on any specific chapter. In response to backlash to the project, Trump’s campaign previously claimed people associated with the project wouldn’t hold roles in his next administration.

Homan also started a non-profit called Border911 that hosted a speaking tour around the country to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border”, the group’s website says, making them “understand that border security is paramount to this nation’s security and prosperity”.

An investigation by a group of non-profit newsrooms detailed how Border911 and Homan were tied to the America Project, the election lie-spreading dark money group started by Patrick Byrne and Mike Flynn. The investigation found that Homan said that “millions of people heading to sanctuary cities will be counted in the next census” in a way that would reapportion congressional seats for Democrats, which he called “almost treasonous”.

Video clips of Homan sparring with members of Congress have gone viral in recent days. In one clip, during a congressional hearing, he dodges questions from Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about whether he was the author of the family separation policy. In another, he tells congressional Democrats that they have “failed the American people”. When Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal sought to rein in his testimony and remind him of time limits, he pushed back and called the hearing a “circus”.

“You work for me,” he told Jayapal. “I’m a taxpayer.”