Morale appears to be surging among border authorities after the election of President-elect Donald Trump, who made border security one of the pillars of his campaign, after nearly four years of relaxed immigration policies that saw record numbers of migrants enter the United States.
In addition to strengthening the southern border, Trump has promised to order mass deportations of illegal immigrants. On Monday, he tapped Tom Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), to serve as "border czar" in his second administration.
During an appearance on "Fox & Friends," Homan, who is widely respected within the Border Patrol and ICE, said he plans to fix the border crisis caused by the Biden administration's policies.
"I’ve been on this network for years complaining about what this administration did to this border," he said. "I’ve been yelling and screaming about it and what they need to do to fix it. So when the president asked me, ‘Would you come back and fix it?’ Of course, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t."
Illegal border crossings surged under President Biden with nearly 3 million in fiscal 2024, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s website. There have been more than 10.8 million illegal encounters since fiscal 2021.
Homan said he supports Trump's mass deportation plan, saying he would be prioritizing "public safety threats and national security threats." When asked during a recent interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" if mass deportations would result in family separations, Homan responded, "Families can be deported together."
U.S. Border Patrol agents and ICE officials told Fox News the change is like night and day.
"It’s a total 180. Troops are finally feeling like the sun is coming out after a very long storm," one Massachusetts ICE officer said. "People are fired up to have support. It’s amazing because we all became so numb. I don’t think we realized how bad until we finally have hope again. Everyone is so happy about Homan's return."
Another ICE officer in New York said morale was "super high, especially with the Homan news, too."
"Ecstatic to go to work! Morale is even higher than the first time he won," an Arizona Border Patrol agent said.
"The morale is through the roof," National Border Patrol Council President Paul Perez said in an interview. "We’ve received hundreds of calls, texts, emails just saying how happy the agents are."
"There are a lot of agents that had originally said that they would retire if President Trump did not win. And now those same agents are saying they're going to hold back on their retirement because they want to serve under this administration again, because they know exactly how it was during this first administration, and they know this one's going to be even better," he said.
"We've all been hopeful but the give-ups are still trickling in," a border agent in California said. "Nothing will change until Tom Homan takes the leash off us."
A border agent in Texas told Fox News that "people who were going to retire are not and everyone is happy."
"I feel that people know now they will get to do the work they signed up to do and that they want to do," a senior ICE official said. "They know they can get the bad guys now. Public safety threats, national security threats, gang members, here we come."
Other officials contacted said they were looking forward to no longer having to use politically correct language, such as "noncitizen," to describe illegal immigrants.
Fox News Digital's Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
