Breaking down allegation Tom Homan accepted $50K bribe from undercover FBI agents

On Sept. 20, 2025, multiple reliable news outlets reported that Tom Homan, U.S. President Donald Trump’s border czar, had accepted $50,000 from an undercover FBI agent. For his part of the alleged deal, Homan was reportedly supposed to help the agents, who were posing as business executives, win government contracts in the second Trump administration.

The issue came to the forefront of public attention in October 2025 when politicians and journalists questioned members of the Trump administration, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Vice President JD Vance, about the alleged bribe. Snopes readers also wrote in and searched the site looking for more information about what happened. 

We were unable to attach a rating to the claim that Homan accepted a $50,000 bribe because we were not able to obtain a firsthand source for the information. Additionally, we could not confirm much information about the investigation into Homan because the reporting that broke the story relied on anonymous sources. We reached out to the FBI for comment on the investigation but had not heard back at time of publication. Here’s what we know:

The alleged bribe

Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Homan — who served as the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term — touted his connection with Trump and claimed he would play a role in the administration if Trump was elected. “I promised President Trump when he announced that if he goes back, I go back,” he posted to X in November 2023. “And I’m going to run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

According to Reuters, the FBI began investigating Homan in August 2024. The New York Times reported that a subject of a different FBI investigation brought up Homan, claiming a payment to him might lead to “lucrative federal contracts for border security work.”

MSNBC reported that FBI agents, posing as contractors, met with a business associate who connected them to Homan, and Homan himself indicated he would be willing to secure government contracts in exchange for money. 

On Sept. 20, 2024, according to all of these news outlets, agents used a hidden camera to record Homan taking $50,000 in cash that was reportedly placed in a bag from the food chain Cava. 

The investigation

According to MSNBC, the FBI “took no further investigative steps in the final months of 2024,” reportedly monitoring Homan to see whether he would attempt to make good on the promise if Trump was elected. The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section agreed to investigate in November 2024.

Authorities shelved the investigation into Homan in 2025. MSNBC and The New York Times reported that Emil Bove, a former personal lawyer to Trump who served as acting deputy attorney general until being appointed as a circuit judge in September 2025, told Justice Department officials he did not approve of the investigation as early as February 2025. 

MSNBC reported that that was around the same time officials in the Public Integrity Section were clashing with Bove, who wanted to dismiss a bribery case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. The section’s supervisors resigned rather than dismiss the case. 

The outcome

Trump critics painted the claim that Homan had accepted $50,000 as him taking a bribe and suggested that the administration had ordered the investigation into Homan closed. 

New outlets reported that the case might not be so clear-cut.

The New York Times wrote that its anonymous sources held different views on the investigation. One official suggested there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Homan with bribery. Another argued that the case was ended prematurely, leaving the Justice Department unable to gather enough evidence to charge him. 

Randall Eliason, a former chief of public corruption prosecutions in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., told MSNBC that Homan probably couldn’t be charged with bribery proper because he was not a public official when he reportedly accepted the money. However, such a person could be charged with conspiracy to commit bribery. “In a conspiracy charge, the crime is the agreement to commit a criminal act in the future,” Eliason said.

Sources