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Did Trump’s deportation czar accept $50K in cash?
The Tom Homan scandal, briefly explained.
Cameron Peters is a staff editor at Vox.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration has ended a federal bribery investigation into one of its top immigration officials.
What happened? Last year, President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan was reportedly recorded accepting $50,000 in cash from “businessmen” — undercover FBI agents — in exchange for promising to help secure government contracts, spurring a Justice Department investigation.
Homan was a private citizen when he is said to have accepted the cash, but he had boasted about playing a prominent role in a potential second Trump administration in the months leading up to the payment. The investigation was closed earlier this year by the Trump administration.
Who is Homan? As border czar, Homan has been one of the public faces of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. He served as acting ICE director in Trump’s first term, and claimed last year that he would “run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”
What has the Trump administration said about the case? The White House denied Homan accepted the money — despite the reported existence of an audio recording of him doing so — and described the investigation into Homan as entrapment and “another example of the weaponization of the Biden DOJ.”
Why does this matter? The Homan story — thousands in cash delivered clandestinely in a takeout bag — would be a major scandal in any other era, under any other administration. Here, it’s one data point in a growing body of evidence for the politicization of Trump’s DOJ, including the Friday resignation of US Attorney Erik Siebert and a subsequent Truth Social post by Trump calling for criminal charges against his political opponents.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
The latest episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast has some great news: The sun will save us. That’s the promise, more or less, of environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben’s latest book, Here Comes the Sun, which is all about how solar and wind energy are poised to drive a clean-energy revolution. My colleague Sean Illing spoke with McKibben for The Gray Area, and you can listen to their conversation here (or read an excerpt here). Have a great evening!
