Abbott praises Homan as 'the right guy' to tackle border security

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) praised President-elect Trump's new border czar, Tom Homan, a 30-plus-year immigration enforcement veteran at the head of Trump's mass deportation pledge.

“There’s a tall task for President Trump to find, to locate these people and then to deport them or to jail them. We’ve got the right guy in charge of it. His name is Tom Homan. He’s going to be the border czar," Abbott told John Catsimatidis on his radio show "Cats Roundtable" on WABC 770 AM.

Homan ran Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in an acting capacity in 2017 and 2018 before announcing his retirement. He started in law enforcement working as a police officer, then moved on to the Border Patrol, the defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service and then ICE, rising through the ranks.

Homan had a reputation as a moderate in the Obama administration, when he led ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) component from 2013 onward, drawing criticism from some hardliners early in the first Trump administration.

Homan, however, became the face of the Trump administration’s most strict immigration policies, reportedly proposing family separations as an immigration deterrent even before Trump became president.

During the interview, Abbott said that he's already started working with Homan on border security and that he expects to see Homan in Texas this week.

"We go to work this coming week on solving the border problems in the state of Texas, as well as across the United States of America," Abbott said.

Abbott has maintained that Texas will have a proactive versus reactive stance at the border and will be prepared should a surge happen ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration. 

Abbott's interview comes as the governor has been making plans to expand buoy barriers across the Rio Grande to stop migrants from crossing the southern border despite border crossings dropping in the state. However, his use of buoys has faced multiple legal challenges.