Meet “The Bag Man.” Trump’s Boarder Czar Takes 50K in FBI Sting. Keeps the Cash and Walks Free.
Tom Homan walked into a meeting in Texas on September 20, 2024, and accepted $50,000 in cash from men he thought were businessmen. They were FBI agents. Hidden cameras captured everything. Multiple sources have confirmed what happened. Career federal prosecutors believed they had evidence to charge him with conspiracy to commit bribery. And yet today, Tom Homan runs Donald Trump’s border operation, overseeing billions in taxpayer dollars and wielding enormous power over immigration policy, because the moment Trump’s political appointees took control of the Justice Department, they killed the investigation and made the whole thing disappear.
The cash was in a Cava bag—not even a briefcase or an envelope, just a takeout bag from a fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant. It’s the kind of detail that seems almost deliberately crude, as if corruption has stopped even pretending to have standards. But this isn’t a story about tackiness or poor operational security. This is a story about how accountability in Trump’s America has become entirely optional for his people, and how a man caught on tape in an FBI sting operation can simply walk away because the president decided he was useful.
The FBI wasn’t looking for Tom Homan. That’s the irony at the heart of this entire mess. They stumbled onto him the way detectives stumble onto bigger fish—by following the small-time operators who can’t help but brag about their connections. The Bureau was running what’s known in law enforcement circles as a “corruption of public officials” investigation in Texas, one of those sprawling probes into government contracting fraud that typically ensnare mid-level fixers and contractors looking to game the system. They had undercover agents posing as businessmen interested in border security contracts, the kind of lucrative government deals that have multiplied exponentially as immigration enforcement has become a growth industry.
Enter Julian “Jace” Calderas, a former Border Patrol agent and ICE official who’d worked under Homan during the Obama administration before leaving government service to start his own company. Calderas co-founded XFed in 2016, a San Antonio-based firm that marketed itself as a veteran- and minority-owned business with “insider perspective” on Department of Homeland Security procurement. The pitch was barely subtle: we know how the system works because we used to be the system. For companies salivating over the prospect of detention facility contracts, transportation deals, or border surveillance technology agreements worth tens of millions, that insider knowledge was worth its weight in gold.
By May 2023, Calderas was in conversation with men he believed were executives from companies eager to break into the border security market. These men were actually FBI agents, and they were recording everything. According to internal Justice Department documents that were later reviewed by multiple news organizations, Calderas couldn’t help himself. He started talking about his connections, his access, his ability to make things happen. And then, as Trump’s political resurrection became increasingly likely throughout 2023 and into 2024, Calderas began floating a proposition that must have made the FBI agents sit up straighter in their chairs.
Tom Homan, Calderas told them, was going to be a major player in a second Trump administration. Everyone knew it. Homan had never stopped talking about it, appearing on Fox News to rail against Biden’s border policies, speaking at conservative conferences, writing op-eds, positioning himself as the inevitable choice to run immigration enforcement once Trump returned. Calderas explained that he and Homan went way back—they’d worked together in ICE, they stayed in touch, they understood each other. And Calderas suggested that for the right price, Homan could help these businessmen secure the contracts they wanted.
The magic number, according to the documents, was one million dollars. That’s what Calderas proposed as the total payment to Homan for his assistance in steering federal contracts to the undercover agents’ supposed companies once Trump won and Homan returned to power. It was breathtakingly brazen, the kind of proposition that might seem too crude to be real except that it was entirely consistent with how these schemes actually work. Calderas wasn’t inventing this approach—he was simply applying the time-tested formula of pay-to-play that has corrupted government contracting since governments started awarding contracts.
For the FBI, this presented both an opportunity and a dilemma. On one hand, if Calderas was telling the truth, they potentially had a future senior government official willing to sell his influence before he even officially had it. On the other hand, Homan wasn’t in government yet, and Trump might not win. But as 2024 progressed and Trump’s poll numbers strengthened, the calculus changed. This wasn’t just some hypothetical corruption case anymore. This was potentially a senior official in a likely future administration who could be compromised from day one.
The Bureau made the decision to pursue it. They didn’t have to entrap anyone—Calderas was already offering the arrangement, and if Homan was willing to participate, that was his choice. So the undercover agents stayed in character, continued their conversations with Calderas, and waited for the opportunity to meet the man himself. The setup was classic FBI tradecraft: no pressure, no elaborate scenario, just businessmen meeting someone who could supposedly help them, with money changing hands if everyone agreed to the terms.
The meeting was arranged for September 20, 2024, at a location in Texas. By this point, Trump was in the final stretch of his campaign, and Homan was everywhere—speaking at rallies, appearing on Fox News multiple times a week, promising that he’d return to government and implement the largest deportation operation in American history. He wasn’t shy about his future role. He was advertising it, banking on it, building his entire post-retirement identity around the assumption that Trump would win and bring him back.
The undercover agents came prepared with hidden cameras and audio recording devices. According to people familiar with the operation, they’d arranged for multiple angles of coverage to ensure that whatever happened would be captured clearly and unambiguously. This wasn’t going to be a case that came down to someone’s word against someone else’s. If Homan took money and made promises, it would all be on tape.
Calderas was there too, playing his role as the connector, the man who could bridge the gap between the businessmen and the government official who could help them. And then Tom Homan arrived. At 62 years old, after more than three decades in law enforcement, after rising through every rank of immigration enforcement, after serving as acting director of ICE, he walked into what he apparently believed was a straightforward business meeting with potential clients once he returned to power.
The conversation, according to sources familiar with the recordings, was remarkably unguarded. Homan apparently discussed his expected role in a second Trump administration, his influence over immigration policy and enforcement operations, and his understanding of how contracts were awarded and who had sway over those decisions. The undercover agents, playing their parts as businessmen seeking an edge in a competitive contracting environment, explained what they wanted: help securing federal contracts for border security services once Trump won and Homan was back in government.
And then came the moment that would define everything that followed. One of the undercover agents produced a bag—not a briefcase, not a manila envelope, but a takeout bag from Cava, the Mediterranean fast-casual chain. Inside was $50,000 in cash. According to the internal Justice Department summary of the operation and multiple sources who’ve been briefed on what the recordings show, Homan accepted it. He took the bag. He took the money. The cameras captured it all.
Calderas, according to the documents, also accepted cash that day—$10,000 for his role in facilitating the arrangement. But he was always a secondary figure in this drama. The FBI’s target, the person whose actions would determine whether this case went anywhere significant, was Homan. And Homan had just taken $50,000 in what federal investigators believed was a down payment on a corrupt agreement to steer government contracts in exchange for money.
The specificity of what was said in that meeting matters enormously for any potential prosecution, and this is where the Trump administration’s later decision to kill the investigation becomes even more suspect. Federal bribery statutes typically require proof of a quid pro quo—something of value exchanged for a specific official act. The murkier the agreement, the harder it is to prosecute. But according to multiple sources familiar with the case, the recordings captured Homan making statements that investigators believed established that connection. He apparently discussed what he could do to help once he was back in government, spoke about his understanding of the contracting process, and gave the undercover agents reason to believe that their payment would result in favorable treatment.
For the FBI agents running the operation, it must have felt almost too easy. They’d set up the meeting, let the subjects do the talking, and captured what they believed was clear evidence of a corrupt agreement. Now came the hard part: what to do with it.
The timing was very awkward. This was September 2024. The election was weeks away. Homan wasn’t in government and wouldn’t be unless Trump won. The Justice Department has longstanding policies about taking actions close to elections that might influence the outcome, but this case didn’t quite fit that framework—Homan wasn’t a candidate, and the investigation wasn’t about Trump directly. Still, there were enormous sensitivities involved. If the FBI arrested Homan before the election, it could be seen as interfering on behalf of Democrats. If they waited until after and Trump lost, it might look like they’d deliberately held back to avoid helping Trump. And if Trump won and appointed Homan to a senior position, well, that’s exactly what happened.
The Bureau made the decision to continue investigating and monitoring but not to move immediately to arrest or charge Homan. According to people familiar with the discussions, several FBI and Justice Department officials believed they had sufficient evidence to charge Homan right then—conspiracy to commit bribery based on his acceptance of the cash and his apparent promises to help with contracts. But Homan’s unique status complicated matters. He wasn’t a current government official, so standard bribery statutes didn’t clearly apply. He was promising to do things in a position he didn’t yet hold, in an administration that didn’t yet exist. Legal experts could argue about whether that constituted bribery under federal law or some other corruption-related crime.
Top officials privately debated the possible charges. Some argued for moving forward immediately with whatever charges fit best. Others felt it would be more prudent to wait until Homan actually returned to government and see if he followed through on his alleged promises—at that point, the case would be much stronger and clearer. There was also the practical reality that Trump might not win, or might not appoint Homan even if he did win, in which case the entire situation might resolve itself.
But Trump did win. And on November 10, 2024, just days after the election, Trump announced that Tom Homan would be his “border czar”—a newly created White House position that would give Homan enormous authority over immigration policy and enforcement without requiring Senate confirmation or the extensive FBI background check that comes with Senate-confirmed positions. It was the perfect workaround for someone who might have complications in his background.
Here’s where the story becomes less about one potentially corrupt official and more about systemic rot. Standard FBI vetting protocols are clear: when there’s an ongoing investigation into someone being considered for a senior government position, the Bureau must notify appropriate Justice Department leadership. Those Justice Department officials are then supposed to inform the incoming administration about the issue. This isn’t optional or discretionary—it’s standard operating procedure designed to ensure that administrations know what they’re getting into when they appoint people.
Which means that someone in the Biden Justice Department would have told someone on the Trump transition team: Tom Homan is under active FBI investigation for allegedly accepting $50,000 in what we believe was a bribery scheme. The investigation includes recordings, undercover operations, and career prosecutors who think they can make a case. You should know this before you appoint him.
And Trump appointed him anyway. He looked at that information—and there’s no plausible scenario where he wasn’t informed, given the protocols and the seriousness of the case—and decided it didn’t matter. Or perhaps more accurately, he decided it was actually a feature rather than a bug. A compromised official is a controllable official. Someone who needs protection from legal jeopardy is someone who’ll never break ranks, never develop a conscience, never become a John Bolton-style critic. Trump had learned this lesson over decades in business and politics: loyalty is everything, and sometimes vulnerability creates the strongest loyalty of all.
After Trump’s announcement, the FBI investigation continued. The Public Integrity Section at Justice Department headquarters—an elite group of career prosecutors who handle sensitive corruption cases involving high-profile officials—formally joined the case in late November 2024. This was significant. The Public Integrity Section doesn’t waste time on weak cases or minor matters. Their involvement signaled that experienced prosecutors believed the evidence was substantial enough to potentially support criminal charges.
Investigators began planning their next steps. They’d wait to see if Homan, once in his position as border czar, would take any actions that appeared to benefit the undercover agents’ supposed companies or that could be tied back to the September meeting. They’d continue building the case, interviewing witnesses, reviewing financial records, preparing for the possibility of bringing charges. According to people familiar with the investigation, there were discussions about the various criminal statutes that might apply: conspiracy to commit bribery, honest services fraud, potentially other corruption-related charges depending on what Homan did once in office.
But they never got the chance to find out. On January 20, 2025, Trump was inaugurated, and the entire complexion of federal law enforcement changed overnight. Christopher Wray, the FBI director who’d overseen the investigation, was gone, replaced by Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist whose primary qualification seemed to be absolute fealty to the president. The Justice Department’s leadership was purged and restocked with Trump appointees whose commitment to independent law enforcement was, at best, theoretical.
In late January or early February 2025, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove was briefed on the Homan investigation. Bove, a Trump appointee with no illusions about what was expected of him, made his position clear quickly: he didn’t support continuing the investigation. According to sources familiar with the meeting, Bove wasn’t particularly interested in hearing about the evidence or the recordings or what career prosecutors thought. The decision had already been made, really. This was a Trump ally, Trump had appointed him despite knowing about the investigation, and now Trump’s Justice Department was going to make the problem go away.
One political appointee allegedly called the case a “deep state” investigation—that all-purpose epithet that has become the Trump administration’s response to any accountability mechanism it finds inconvenient. Never mind that the investigation had been conducted by career FBI agents following standard procedures. Never mind that it had been approved by career prosecutors who believed the evidence supported potential charges. Never mind that there were recordings and documents and multiple sources. It was inconvenient to the Trump administration, therefore it was “deep state,” therefore it would be shut down.
And shut down it was. No further investigative steps were taken. The prosecutors who’d been preparing potential charges were told to stand down. The FBI agents who’d built the case watched their work get dismantled for purely political reasons. By September 2025, after Kash Patel requested a status update on the case—presumably to make sure it was good and dead—the investigation was formally closed.
Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a carefully worded joint statement: “This matter originated under the previous administration and was subjected to a full review by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing. The Department’s resources must remain focused on real threats to the American people, not baseless investigations. As a result, the investigation has been closed.”
Every word of that statement deserves scrutiny. “Subjected to a full review” suggests a thorough, objective examination when in reality Trump appointees simply decided the case was politically inconvenient. “No credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing” contradicts what multiple career prosecutors had concluded about the strength of the case. “Baseless investigations” is particularly galling—an FBI sting operation with recordings and multiple sources is many things, but baseless isn’t one of them.
The White House piled on with its own spin. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially made the bewildering claim that Homan “never took the $50,000,” a statement so factually challenged that she had to immediately abandon it in favor of a different defense: this was an FBI entrapment operation targeting Trump’s allies. Deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson called it “a blatantly political investigation, which found no evidence of illegal activity” and “yet another example of how the Biden Department of Justice was using its resources to target President Trump’s allies rather than investigate real criminals and the millions of illegal aliens who flooded our country.”
It’s a remarkable piece of rhetorical gymnastics. An FBI investigation that began in May 2023, long before Homan was guaranteed any role in a future Trump administration, is somehow “blatantly political.” An operation that followed standard investigative procedures—undercover agents, recordings, careful documentation—is somehow improper. And the real villains, according to the White House, aren’t people who allegedly take cash for contracts, but rather the investigators who caught them doing it.
Homan himself contributed his own carefully parsed denial. On Fox News with Laura Ingraham, he said, “I did nothing criminal, I did nothing illegal.” Watch how precise that language is. He didn’t say “I didn’t take the money.” He didn’t say “this meeting never happened.” He didn’t say “Calderas is lying and the FBI is making this up.” He said he did nothing criminal or illegal, which is a claim about legal conclusions, not facts. It’s the kind of statement that only makes sense if you accept the premise that taking $50,000 from people you believe are businessmen in exchange for promises about future government contracts somehow doesn’t count as long as you’re not technically in office yet.
The carefully worded denials and the speed with which the investigation was killed raise the most obvious questions that no one in the Trump administration wants to answer. Where’s the money now? If Homan accepted $50,000 in September 2024—and the careful parsing of every denial suggests he did—what happened to it? Did he return it once he realized he’d been caught? Did he keep it? Did he report it on financial disclosure forms? Did it go toward the home remodeling project his wife had to put on hold when he returned to government service? The FBI would have records—bank deposits, or the absence of deposits, or documentation of the money being returned. But now that the investigation is dead, buried by political appointees with every incentive to protect their own, we’ll likely never get answers.
And what about Calderas? He was allegedly recorded accepting $10,000 at the same meeting. He was reportedly the one who initiated the entire scheme, proposing the million-dollar arrangement and setting up the meeting. Yet there’s been no indication that he’s facing any charges either. Has he been offered immunity? Is he cooperating? Or has his case simply been killed along with Homan’s because pursuing charges against the middleman would inevitably lead back to questions about the main target?
The silence from the Justice Department on these questions is deafening. Under the old norms—the ones that existed before Trump decided that the Justice Department exists to protect his friends and persecute his enemies—there would be some accountability here. Even if prosecutors decided not to bring charges, there would typically be some explanation, some transparency about why a case with apparently strong evidence was dropped. But in Trump’s Justice Department, accountability flows in only one direction: toward his enemies, never toward his allies.
House Democrats have tried to force some measure of transparency. Congressman Jamie Raskin and the Judiciary Committee sent letters to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel demanding the release of the recordings and all investigative files. “Confirmed by six sources and reportedly captured on recordings now in DOJ and FBI’s possession, this startling episode is powerful evidence that Mr. Homan may have committed multiple federal felonies, including conspiracy to commit bribery,” the Democrats wrote. “Your reported effort to shut down this investigation appears to be a brazen cover-up to protect Donald Trump’s allies.”
They’re right, of course. It is a brazen cover-up. It’s also perfectly consistent with how this administration operates. Transparency is treated as a partisan attack. Accountability is something that only applies to enemies. The recordings that could settle every factual question about what happened in that Texas meeting—what was said, what was promised, what was handed over—will likely remain locked away forever, kept from the American people by political appointees whose job is to protect the administration, not to pursue justice.
The full scope of what the FBI captured in those recordings may never be known publicly, but the implications are already clear enough. Federal investigators believed they had a case. Career prosecutors thought the evidence supported charges. The Public Integrity Section—not known for taking on weak cases—formally joined the investigation. And then political appointees killed it all because the target was a Trump loyalist and allowing the investigation to proceed would have been inconvenient.
This is how democracies rot from within. Not with dramatic coups or constitutional crises, but with the quiet corruption of justice systems, the steady erosion of the principle that no one is above the law, the normalization of the idea that political loyalty matters more than evidence or ethics or accountability. Tom Homan took that money in September 2024—everything about the official response suggests he did—and he’s not just getting away with it, he’s being protected by the full weight of the federal government he allegedly tried to sell.
The FBI agents who spent months building that case, who ran that operation, who documented everything carefully and professionally—they must be watching this with a sick feeling. They did their jobs. They followed the evidence. They built what they believed was a prosecutable case. And then political appointees looked at all their work and decided that protecting Tom Homan was more important than prosecuting corruption.
Meanwhile, Homan continues running Trump’s deportation machine, overseeing billions in contracts, wielding enormous power over immigration policy and enforcement. The very contracts he allegedly promised to help steer are now flowing through his operation. GEO Group, the private prison company that paid him consulting fees between his two stints in government, continues receiving lucrative government deals. The whole corrupt system keeps humming along as if nothing happened, because in Trump’s America, nothing did happen. The investigation was “baseless,” the evidence wasn’t “credible,” and anyone who asks uncomfortable questions is just being political.
This is the real scandal of how the FBI’s sting operation unfolded and how it died. Not just that Homan allegedly took the money, but that every system designed to hold powerful people accountable was systematically dismantled to protect him. The investigation that followed proper procedures. The career prosecutors who believed in the case. The oversight mechanisms that should have ensured transparency. All of it was simply swept aside because Tom Homan is loyal to Trump, and in this administration, that’s the only credential that matters.
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