The Disinformation Network Profiting Off the False ‘Invasion’ Narrative
People in Mexico head to the Pedestrian West Facility border crossing in Tijuana for legal entry into the United States. Photo via @fronterainfo X
The Times of San Diego
Editor’s Note: This report is an investigative collaboration between Lighthouse Reports, where Melissa del Bosque is an investigations editor, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, the Texas Observer, palabra, and Puente News Collaborative.
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For a retired federal employee, Tom Homan, an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, is a very busy man. For the last year, he’s crisscrossed the country with a team of former state and federal law enforcement officers, who call themselves Border911, speaking in theaters and event halls from Phoenix, Arizona, to Mission, Texas, to Ronkonkoma, New York, to promote the propaganda that the U.S.-Mexico border is under invasion and that President Joe Biden and his allies are admitting “llegal aliens” so that Democrats will “be in power for years to come.”
Homan, the president and CEO of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc., and his group’s members have largely flown under the radar, receiving little coverage outside of right-wing media. But if Trump were to win this November, Homan, the architect of Trump’s family separation initiative, and his allies could receive prominent posts. Trump already promised at a rally this summer that he is “bringing back” Homan in 2025.
“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan vowed during a July immigration panel in Washington, D.C. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
The mission of Homan’s tax-exempt Border911 Foundation, formed in Virginia in October 2023, is to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border,” according to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings. But, by promoting disinformation about a “border invasion” of “illegal immigrants,” Homan’s Border911, the nickname he often uses for the foundation, is helping to lay the groundwork for challenging November’s election if the results don’t favor Trump.
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