March 17, 2025 • 6 mins
Larry Mendte and Reagan Reese discuss Tom Homan's journey to becoming the "Border Czar" and the anticipated phone call between Trump and Putin.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Reagan.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
Reese is the White House correspondent for the Daily Caller
and she's also an independent Women's Foreign Forum Visiting Fellow.
He made you foreign for a second Women's Forum visiting Fellow, Reagan.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Are you Irish?
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Well no, I'm Welsh, Welsh and Polish.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Oh well, everybody's Irish today, So just go ahead, just
go ahead and go with it. Hey, you have a
fascinating story about how Tom Holman got his job.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Share it with us.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah. So I have the opportunity to do a profile
on Tom Homan. This Borders Are, that's really just taken
over the GOP. He's become this star and he the
whole point of the piece is to figure out how
did we get Tom Holman? The Borders Are? Where did
Tom Holman come from? And it all begins in nineteen
(00:51):
eighty four when he was a cop up in New York,
upstate New York, and he went fishing on the Saint
Lawrence River. It's a river he had gone fishing on
many times when he was a kid. He went with
a couple of his cop friends and there they saw
a Border Patrol agent dacking on a nearby bay, and
that Border Patrol agent stopped to talk to them, and
(01:11):
by the end of that conversation, Tom knew he wanted
to be a border patrol agent, and a couple months
later he was But you know, that would be he
works for President Reagan there, that would be the first
of six presidents he would work for. He thought his
last president was going to be President Barack Obama, where
he was actually called the deportator in chief under President
(01:35):
Barack Obama. He was at his retirement party at Obama's
DHS shaking hands with his colleagues when his chief of
staff runs in and says, hey, you have an emergency
phone call in your office. His office is all boxed
and packed up. He's like, okay, I guess I can
take one more phone call. It was Trump's incoming DHS
(01:57):
Secretary John Kelly telling Tom that the President elect, Donald
Trump wanted him to come back and run ice and
so Tom took the weekend to think about it. He'd
already kind of accepted that retirement gig, and on Monday
he said, Okay, I'll come back. And that was just
the first time he had come out of retirement for
(02:18):
President Trump. He came out of retirement again in twenty
twenty five when he was named the Bordersar.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, and he's been amazing. He's like at a central casting.
He is so good at his job, and he's so
good on television, and he seems fearless. We're big fans
of him here. I talk about him all the time.
As a matter of fact, I admitted I have a
bit of a man crush on him, and I think
that's the reason. I think that's the reason he's not
doing interviews with us anymore. Actually, he's in such demand.
(02:47):
I just saw him. I looked up. He was in
CNN a moment ago. He just seems to be everywhere.
Did you get a chance to talk to him in
person or was this over the phone?
Speaker 3 (02:55):
This was just over the phone.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, but it was more relaxed, right. Is he still
as intense? You know?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
By the end of the phone call, he definitely was emotional.
We started talking about there's this trend on social media
of you know, let's say, uninformed Americans claiming that Ice
is going to raid your schools and take all the
undocumented children. And he was, you know, got really fired
(03:24):
up about that at the end and was telling me,
you know, how falls that is that they haven't raided
any schools. And you know, I talked to one of
his mentors, his longtime mentor, Bob Wallace, who told me
of the time that they were on a you know,
one of their first missions in two thousand and three,
(03:44):
and there was a group of migrants who were trying
to be smuggled across the border in a truck and
half a dozen of them or a dozen of them
suffocated to death in that truck. It had no circulation.
And when Tom got there, there as a father still
that was deceased, still holding his little child in his arms,
(04:05):
who was also deceased. And Bob said that kind of
was the beginning of how he knew that Tom was
going to go far and that this guy was all in,
and that this guy was a cops cop. Because Tom
had a five year old son at the time he
saw that, it really hit home and he you know,
that kind of is like this origin story of where
(04:26):
he gets where he becomes so emotional. Tom tells me,
you know, if you if people had seen what he
had seen, they would understand that a secure border saves lives.
And that's why he gets emotional because of the things
that he has seen when he was a special agent,
when he was a border patrol agent, when he was
out on the ground like this two thousand and three story.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, that's a great story. Thanks for sharing with us.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Now, let's talk about some of the news of the
day if we can, because there's some important talks going on.
President Trump is going to speak with President Putin tomorrow.
We know what the top is going to be. Do
we know where things stand right now in those talks.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
That's a great question, you know, because it's Putin and
it's the United States and Donald Trump, and it's also Ukraine.
I think it's been a little up in the air
what's going on. It does seem like we are getting
closer to a piece agreement, you know, And to even
say that just a week or two after that Oval
(05:27):
Office blow up between President Trump, JD. Vans and Zelensky
kind of seems unbelievable. But yeah, I think we're looking
at I do think Putin has said that he's open
to a piece agreement, and so the United States has
always been clear that there are going to be things
that Russia is going to need to go give up,
and of course Russia is probably not going to want
(05:49):
to get those things up, and so I imagine that's going
to be part of what this phone call is going
to discuss.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It's interesting whenever there's these phone calls, one of two
things is happening. He needs a little nudge and President
Trump has to talk him into something, or this is
the end and Donald Trump gets to make the final
phone call and have a piece deal. So it's going
to be interesting to find out which one of those
(06:15):
things it's going to be. Reagan Reese, thanks so much
for talking to us. I appreciate your time. White House
correspondent for the Daily Caller, an independent women's foreign visiting fellow.
You can read her stuff at the Dailycaller dot com.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
By the way, just out of curiosity, what do you
have today? Anything?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
There's a press briefing at one and.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
You're gonna be there and we'll talk to you about
it next week. Thanks a lot, Reagan
Reagan.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
Reese is the White House correspondent for the Daily Caller
and she's also an independent Women's Foreign Forum Visiting Fellow.
He made you foreign for a second Women's Forum visiting Fellow, Reagan.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Are you Irish?
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Well no, I'm Welsh, Welsh and Polish.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Oh well, everybody's Irish today, So just go ahead, just
go ahead and go with it. Hey, you have a
fascinating story about how Tom Holman got his job.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Share it with us.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah. So I have the opportunity to do a profile
on Tom Homan. This Borders Are, that's really just taken
over the GOP. He's become this star and he the
whole point of the piece is to figure out how
did we get Tom Holman? The Borders Are? Where did
Tom Holman come from? And it all begins in nineteen
(00:51):
eighty four when he was a cop up in New York,
upstate New York, and he went fishing on the Saint
Lawrence River. It's a river he had gone fishing on
many times when he was a kid. He went with
a couple of his cop friends and there they saw
a Border Patrol agent dacking on a nearby bay, and
that Border Patrol agent stopped to talk to them, and
(01:11):
by the end of that conversation, Tom knew he wanted
to be a border patrol agent, and a couple months
later he was But you know, that would be he
works for President Reagan there, that would be the first
of six presidents he would work for. He thought his
last president was going to be President Barack Obama, where
he was actually called the deportator in chief under President
(01:35):
Barack Obama. He was at his retirement party at Obama's
DHS shaking hands with his colleagues when his chief of
staff runs in and says, hey, you have an emergency
phone call in your office. His office is all boxed
and packed up. He's like, okay, I guess I can
take one more phone call. It was Trump's incoming DHS
(01:57):
Secretary John Kelly telling Tom that the President elect, Donald
Trump wanted him to come back and run ice and
so Tom took the weekend to think about it. He'd
already kind of accepted that retirement gig, and on Monday
he said, Okay, I'll come back. And that was just
the first time he had come out of retirement for
(02:18):
President Trump. He came out of retirement again in twenty
twenty five when he was named the Bordersar.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, and he's been amazing. He's like at a central casting.
He is so good at his job, and he's so
good on television, and he seems fearless. We're big fans
of him here. I talk about him all the time.
As a matter of fact, I admitted I have a
bit of a man crush on him, and I think
that's the reason. I think that's the reason he's not
doing interviews with us anymore. Actually, he's in such demand.
(02:47):
I just saw him. I looked up. He was in
CNN a moment ago. He just seems to be everywhere.
Did you get a chance to talk to him in
person or was this over the phone?
Speaker 3 (02:55):
This was just over the phone.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, but it was more relaxed, right. Is he still
as intense? You know?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
By the end of the phone call, he definitely was emotional.
We started talking about there's this trend on social media
of you know, let's say, uninformed Americans claiming that Ice
is going to raid your schools and take all the
undocumented children. And he was, you know, got really fired
(03:24):
up about that at the end and was telling me,
you know, how falls that is that they haven't raided
any schools. And you know, I talked to one of
his mentors, his longtime mentor, Bob Wallace, who told me
of the time that they were on a you know,
one of their first missions in two thousand and three,
(03:44):
and there was a group of migrants who were trying
to be smuggled across the border in a truck and
half a dozen of them or a dozen of them
suffocated to death in that truck. It had no circulation.
And when Tom got there, there as a father still
that was deceased, still holding his little child in his arms,
(04:05):
who was also deceased. And Bob said that kind of
was the beginning of how he knew that Tom was
going to go far and that this guy was all in,
and that this guy was a cops cop. Because Tom
had a five year old son at the time he
saw that, it really hit home and he you know,
that kind of is like this origin story of where
(04:26):
he gets where he becomes so emotional. Tom tells me,
you know, if you if people had seen what he
had seen, they would understand that a secure border saves lives.
And that's why he gets emotional because of the things
that he has seen when he was a special agent,
when he was a border patrol agent, when he was
out on the ground like this two thousand and three story.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, that's a great story. Thanks for sharing with us.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Now, let's talk about some of the news of the
day if we can, because there's some important talks going on.
President Trump is going to speak with President Putin tomorrow.
We know what the top is going to be. Do
we know where things stand right now in those talks.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
That's a great question, you know, because it's Putin and
it's the United States and Donald Trump, and it's also Ukraine.
I think it's been a little up in the air
what's going on. It does seem like we are getting
closer to a piece agreement, you know, And to even
say that just a week or two after that Oval
(05:27):
Office blow up between President Trump, JD. Vans and Zelensky
kind of seems unbelievable. But yeah, I think we're looking
at I do think Putin has said that he's open
to a piece agreement, and so the United States has
always been clear that there are going to be things
that Russia is going to need to go give up,
and of course Russia is probably not going to want
(05:49):
to get those things up, and so I imagine that's going
to be part of what this phone call is going
to discuss.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It's interesting whenever there's these phone calls, one of two
things is happening. He needs a little nudge and President
Trump has to talk him into something, or this is
the end and Donald Trump gets to make the final
phone call and have a piece deal. So it's going
to be interesting to find out which one of those
(06:15):
things it's going to be. Reagan Reese, thanks so much
for talking to us. I appreciate your time. White House
correspondent for the Daily Caller, an independent women's foreign visiting fellow.
You can read her stuff at the Dailycaller dot com.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
By the way, just out of curiosity, what do you
have today? Anything?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
There's a press briefing at one and.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
You're gonna be there and we'll talk to you about
it next week. Thanks a lot, Reagan
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