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Jin Kang, the CEO of a telecom and IT company, was talking to stock analysts this past spring, when he was asked about the company’s prospects for winning government contracts.
Kang said his firm, WidePoint, had technology that could help the Department of Homeland Security track down cellphones given to immigrants who had been released on bail, pending deportation hearings. All the company needed was a foot in the door.
“So we’ve been trying to get access to Tom Homan and the folks over at DHS at the secretary level,” Kang said. “I think we’ve gotten some…traction, but it’s too early to tell, but we are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door to talk about the potential savings that we could provide.”
Kang’s statement stands out because Homan, prior to joining the second Trump administration as its “border czar,” ran a consulting firm that helped companies pursue government contracts. It does not appear that WidePoint was a Homan client, but other current contractors were. Homan has vowed, as federal ethics guidance advises, to stay out of federal procurement decisions.
“We are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door.”
Kang’s claim is even more striking in light of news reports that Homan was recorded last year accepting $50,000 in a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen paying for help winning government contracts in a second Trump administration. Homan has said he did nothing illegal and has stated that he “didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” Trump’s Justice Department ultimately dropped the matter after investigators, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.” The White House has called the FBI probe “a blatantly political investigation” by the Biden administration.
Kang’s WidePoint, which won a DHS cellphone contract in the last months of President Donald Trump’s first term and is angling to win another worth up to $3 billion, is just one of several companies that have reportedly tried to enlist Homan’s help in drumming up federal contracts.
In June, Homan met with companies seeking contracts to build new immigration detention facilities, Bloomberg reported. Many of those contracts are being awarded by the US military, and Homan, according to the report, “was then expected to discuss the matter with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.”
In addition, a review by Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight shows that a number of Homan’s former clients from his time in the private sector have been awarded lucrative border and immigration-related contracts during the second Trump administration. Those projects include constructing private prisons, sprawling migrant detention camps, and a section of border wall. It is not clear whether Homan has played any role in helping his former clients land these deals—the White House says he has no involvement in the “actual awarding” of contracts.
Regardless, the pattern highlights what critics call the legalized corruption of Washington. While Homan denies taking a bag of cash to rig a contract, he openly ran a business in which he traded on his years of government work and high-level contacts to help clients who paid him prosper in the procurement process. Now that he is back in government, even the impression that he can influence federal contract awards creates the appearance of corruption, ethics experts argue.
Among would-be contractors, “the perception is that Homan can put in a good word—whether compensated or not compensated in cash, with or without a bag man—and in some sense, the damage is done,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies government ethics. Homan’s perceived influence, even after the alleged bag incident, sends “the message…that this is not disqualifying and people who want some portion of the trough that is DHS at this point can look to Homan, among others, for assistance,” Clark said.
Homan referred questions to White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, who dismissed concerns.
“As the Border Czar, Tom Homan occasionally meets with a variety of people to learn about new developments and capabilities to serve the needs of the American people – in doing so he continues to adhere to the federal ethics and [conflict] of interests rules,” Jackson said. “Tom has no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract. Tom is a career law enforcement officer and lifelong public servant, with the utmost integrity, who is doing a phenomenal job on behalf of President Trump and the country.”
A White House official also said Homan “has not had any conversations, nor been involved in any conversations,” with WidePoint or any of the other companies discussed in this article “regarding contracts or business interests.” The official said Homan, a White House employee, has “no role in deciding or awarding contracts for DHS.”
Homan was well-situated to capitalize on his insights and government connections. He spent three decades working for the US Border Patrol and in 2013 was appointed to a high-ranking position with ICE by President Barack Obama—a post in which Homan pioneered the idea of using family separations as a tool to discourage illegal immigration.
Homan stayed on into the first Trump administration, but left his role as acting ICE director in June 2018—soon after the public outcry over family separations reached a fever pitch.
Homan’s consulting company boasted that it has “a proven track record of opening doors.”
Apparently, he already had been planning a leap to the private sector. In May 2018—just days after he announced that he would leave the administration—the state of Virginia approved paperwork incorporating a new business he founded, called Homeland Strategic Consulting. He spent the rest of Trump’s first term and the Biden years transforming himself from a lifetime government official into an advocate with insider perspectives and connections to the powerful for the many business interests trying to score government deals.
As of last December, the website of Homan’s consulting company boasted that the firm has “a proven track record of opening doors and bringing successful relationships to our clients, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts to private companies.”
In 2021, Homan’s firm registered to lobby in Texas for Fisher Sand & Gravel, a North Dakota-based construction company that was seeking work building portions of border wall. Texas records show Fisher paid Homeland Strategic Consulting up to $186,000.
Fisher is a controversial company. In 2019, it built short sections of border wall in Texas and New Mexico. The work was financed by “We Build the Wall,” an effort involving Steve Bannon in which organizers crowdsourced private donations to fence off the country from Mexico. In 2020, We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage, Bannon, and two other men were charged with defrauding donors by misappropriating money they raised. While the other three defendants were convicted and jailed, Bannon escaped federal prosecution when Trump pardoned him hours before leaving office in 2021. Bannon pleaded guilty in February to defrauding donors in a similar case brought by Manhattan’s district attorney.
The sections of wall Fisher did complete have been lambasted as poorly built. In 2022, Fisher reached an undisclosed agreement with the Justice Department to settle a lawsuit over the project. Fisher has also repeatedly been sued by environmental groups.
But Fisher, whose CEO Tommy Fisher has supported many GOP lawmakers, has tapped Trump world support to continue landing contracts. Last year, with Homan’s help, the company scored a $225 million contract from Texas to build a new section of border wall there. And in June 2025, this erstwhile Homan client won a $309 million contract from Customs and Border Protection to build a 27-mile section of wall in Arizona’s Santa Cruz County. The company did not respond to inquiries.
Fisher isn’t the only former Homan client continuing to seek federal contracts that intersect with Homan’s White House portfolio.
USA Up Star, a company that specializes in quickly constructing temporary buildings in response to emergencies, is a former client of Homan’s that donated $100,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration committee in January and $15,000 in June 2024 to a pro-Trump super-PAC called Right for America. A Federal Election Committee database does not show any other corporate contributions from that company, though its owner and president, Klay South, previously donated to PACs supporting Ron DeSantis.
In the months before the 2024 election, according to Bloomberg, “USA Up Star executives had regular calls and meetings with Homan to explore an expansion into immigration detention.” The construction company, Bloomberg reported, was pitching “a sprawling tent camp in El Paso, Texas, where people would be held in pens and surveilled from overhead by guards in wooden structures.”
This September, the US Navy awarded a massive border security and immigration enforcement contract to dozens of companies, including USA Up Star. The deal could ultimately be worth up to $20 billion for each contractor over several years, according to a government press release. The contract includes work providing “safe and secure confinement for aliens in the administrative custody of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” per contracting records, as well as less controversial work, such as providing support in response to natural disasters.
In response to written questions, South declined to comment. He also wrote: “Get Fucked.”
Another past Homan client is SE&M Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based consulting firm that, like Homan’s former consultancy, helps other companies win government contracts. SE&M’s CEO is Charles Sowell, who also serves as chairman of the board of the Border911 Foundation, a border security-focused nonprofit founded and led by Homan. According to Sowell’s bio, he served in the Navy for 27 years, managed a Texas-based federal facility for unaccompanied migrant children in 2021, and attended the Border Patrol Industry Academy. USA Up Star is also an SE&M client, per reporting from ProPublica. SE&M’s website has touted “access to senior leaders in government.”
In August, according to Bloomberg, two SE&M clients met with Mark Hall, a top adviser to Homan who works in the administration. Hall is a former longtime Border Patrol agent who also served as a Border911 Foundation board member. (Another former board member is Rodney Scott, the head of Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for the Border Patrol.) SE&M Solutions and Border911 did not respond to requests for comment.
And then there’s GEO Group, a private prison behemoth that runs a sprawling network of immigrant detention centers. ICE’s largest contractor, GEO Group also offers related services such as transporting detainees and tracking immigrants who are not detained. Homan reported on his financial disclosure form that he had worked as a consultant for GEO’s health care arm during the prior year.
GEO Group donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration. That’s in addition to 2024 contributions from GEO’s political action committee, senior executives, and a GEO subsidiary totaling more than $1 million to Trump-aligned political entities, according to a Project On Government Oversight review of Federal Election Commission records.
GEO has seen its fortunes rise this year as the current administration has set new records for the number of people held in immigration detention, recently hitting 66,000. The population of detainees is up nearly 70 percent since Trump’s inauguration—the vast majority have no criminal convictions. Since Inauguration Day, ICE has awarded GEO new detention contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
“This represents the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our Company’s history,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s executive chairman, said in a November statement.
GEO did not respond to a request for comment. But it has been vocal about benefiting from the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “As a long-standing support services provider for ICE with a 40-year-long track record, we believe we are uniquely positioned to assist the agency to meet its objectives,” Zoley said over the summer.
This story was reported with the Project On Government Oversight.
Samantha Michaels contributed reporting.
