“They do not have President Trump running the show,” Border Czar Tom Homan told The Pavlovic Today when asked why the United Kingdom failed to carry out its Rwanda deportation plan.
His remarks came as Rwanda confirmed it will accept deported migrants from the United States under a new Rwanda deportation deal, marking a policy win for President Donald Trump as he moves forward with mass deportations in his second term.
During a White House press gaggle on Wednesday, Homan confirmed he is “working on” sending the first group of deportees to Rwanda, though he did not give an exact date.
While the United States moves ahead with the Rwanda deportation deal, the United Kingdom’s attempt to implement a similar policy was ultimately abandoned after facing legal, political and human rights challenges.
According to Homan, the difference is clear: It takes political will—the kind only President Trump has.
The U.K. effort, by contrast, never got off the ground.
The U.K. government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda applied to individuals who had arrived in the country “illegally” after Jan. 1, 2022, from so-called safe countries such as France. Under the policy, their asylum claims would not be processed in Britain but in Rwanda. If successful, they would be granted refugee status and allowed to remain in Rwanda permanently. If denied, they could apply to stay in Rwanda on other grounds or seek asylum in a third safe country. The plan explicitly prohibited return to the United Kingdom.
The initiative, championed by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and later Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, was designed to deter the growing number of small boat crossings across the English Channel—a central issue in Britain’s immigration policy. By June 2024, more than 11,000 people had crossed the Channel that year alone, surpassing figures from the same period in each of the four prior years.
Although Parliament passed legislation to support the Rwanda scheme, it was blocked by the U.K. Supreme Court in November 2023, which ruled that Rwanda was not a safe country for asylum seekers. The Sunak government responded by ratifying a new treaty with Rwanda and passing emergency legislation declaring the country safe.
The political backlash was swift.
Labour called the deportation flights a “gimmick,” while the Liberal Democrats accused the government of wasting millions of pounds. Still, Sunak stood firm.
“No ifs, no buts, these flights are going to Rwanda,” Sunak told Parliament at the time, promising the first flight would take off within 10 to 12 weeks.
But following Labour’s landslide election victory in 2024, the plan was scrapped. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper officially canceled the program before any deportation flights had taken place.
This isn’t the first time Homan has weighed in on Britain’s border policy.
“Take a page out of the Trump playbook. Two months ago, we had the lowest numbers of crossings in the history of the nation,” Homan recently told The Telegraph.
As Trump ramps up his immigration crackdown, the U.S.-Rwanda agreement stands as a high-stakes test of international coordination—and a sharp contrast in political execution. Whether Washington succeeds where London failed may come down, as Homan put it, to the defining difference: leadership with the will to act.
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