Mr. Wilcox is IRLI’s chief executive officer and is responsible for the overall management of the organization. He is a distinguished litigator who has dedicated his career to protecting civil rights and promoting accountability, transparency, and integrity in government and fidelity to the rule of law. Prior to joining IRLI, he served as State and Local Director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) where he developed and executed a successful legislative program to advance FAIR’s mission to stem unlawful immigration and promote legal immigration levels consistent with the national interest.
Full BioPrior to FAIR, Mr. Wilcox worked with Judicial Watch, Inc. (JW) for more than ten years where he served as counsel and Executive Director of Judicial Watch’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. In this regard, he was involved in several seminal JW investigations that uncovered government corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse, including the Filegate, Chinagate, Commercegate, and Pardongate scandals, litigated numerous FOIA lawsuits that forced release of important government records, including the CCTV camera footage of American Airlines Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon on 9/11 and documents establishing government abuse and incompetence relating to the handling of the anthrax letters sent to members of Congress, and successfully litigated a variety of high-profile cases, including a whistleblower and discrimination lawsuit on behalf of a Hispanic Immigration and Naturalization Service special agent involved in the Elian Gonzalez matter and a whistleblower lawsuit on behalf of a senior government official whose waste, fraud, and abuse disclosures caused Congress to suspend paying its United Nations dues in the latter 1990s.
Prior to joining JW, Mr. Wilcox served as associate attorney with the prestigious Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom law firm in Terre Haute, Indiana. His practice mainly concentrated on civil rights, non-profit corporate and tax law, and campaign finance and election law. In this regard, he successfully challenged as unconstitutional by impinging free speech and association the newly enacted campaign finance schemes in the states of Arkansas, Colorado, and North Carolina. In addition, he successfully represented members of the United States House of Representatives and Indiana House of Representatives in actions before the Federal Election Commission on campaign finance issues and in recount and contest proceedings.
He is a cum laude graduate of the Regent University School of Law and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science with a minor in philosophy from the University of Louisville. He is a member of the bars of the United States Supreme Court, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh and District of Columbia Circuits, United States District Courts for the District of Columbia and Northern and Southern Districts of Indiana, Supreme Court of the State of Indiana, and District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
Mr. Homan served as Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) , the principal investigative agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from January 30, 2017 until his retirement on June 30, 2018. In this role, Mr. Homan advanced ICE’s mission to promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of approximately 400 federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration.
Full BioSince 2013, and until his retirement, Mr. Homan served as the executive associate director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). In this capacity, he led ICE ‘s efforts to identify, arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens, including those who present a danger to national security or are a risk to public safety, as well as those who enter the United States illegally or otherwise undermine the integrity of our immigration laws and our border control efforts.
Mr. Homan is a 33-year veteran of law enforcement and has nearly 30 years of immigration enforcement experience. He has served as a police officer in New York; a U.S. Border Patrol agent; a special agent with the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service; as well as supervisory special agent and deputy assistant director for investigations at ICE. In 1999, Mr. Homan became the assistant district director for investigations (ADDI) in San Antonio, Texas, and three years later transferred to the ADDI position in Dallas, Texas.
Upon the creation of ICE, Mr. Homan was named as the assistant agent in charge in Dallas. In March 2009, Mr. Homan accepted the position of assistant director for enforcement within ERO at ICE headquarters and was subsequently promoted to deputy executive associate director of ERO.
Mr. Homan holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and received the Presidential Rank Award in 2015 for his exemplary leadership and extensive accomplishments in the area of immigration enforcement.
Mr. Hajec serves as Director of Litigation, and is responsible for overseeing IRLI’s public interest litigation. He has focused his career on constitutional and other civil rights law in the public interest, and has had an abiding concern about the many adverse effects of illegal and excessive legal immigration on American jobs and communities.
Full BioPrior to joining IRLI, Mr. Hajec was an attorney at the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), where he litigated a string of high-profile cases, including the defense of videographer James O’Keefe in suits brought by former ACORN employees, a class action suit on behalf of Asian American students discriminated against by the New York City public schools, and a case that resulted in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals striking down Texas’s psychologists licensing statute as an overbroad restriction on free speech.
Before CIR, Mr. Hajec was an officer in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps, where he served as a defense counsel before courts-martial and then as Appellate Government Counsel, arguing over 100 appeals before the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals and the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. He was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal on the basis of “superior performance.”
He received his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and his undergraduate degree, cum laude, from the University of Michigan. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Miami, and studied philosophy and sociology at Oxford University in England. He is a member of the bars of the United States Supreme Court, District of Columbia Court of Appeals, Pennsylvania, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits.
Mr. Lonergan serves as Director of Communications. He has a wide array of experience in television, print media, podcasting and digital marketing. Mr. Lonergan is a veteran of corporate communications in the Washington, D.C. market and has worked at several trade associations in and around the nation’s capital.
Full BioPreviously he directed communications at the Media Research Center, one of the nation’s premier media watchdog organizations. He started his career as a journalist and has interviewed a long list of public figures from the world of business and politics. A native of Scranton, Pa., Mr. Lonergan earned a Master of Science degree from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. from the University of Arizona.
Mr. O’Brien serves as Director of Investigations and is responsible for overseeing IRLI’s investigations into fraud, waste, abuse and other misconduct in the application and enforcement of America’s immigration laws. Mr. O’Brien has nearly 30 years of experience in immigration law and policy. Prior to joining IRLI, he was an Immigration Judge, sitting on the U.S. Immigration Court at Arlington, VA.
Full BioFrom 2016 to 2020, he served as the director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. From 2008 to 2016, he held a number of positions at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security including Assistant Chief Counsel with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Senior Advisor to the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, and Chief of the National Security Division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. From 1997 to 2003, he was an immigration attorney in private practice, in Boston and New York. From 1996 to 1997, he served as a District Adjudications Officer with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service. He holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Maine School of Law, a Master of Arts in National Security Affairs from the Institute of World Politics and a Bachelor of Arts in French from the Johns Hopkins University. He is a member of the Bar of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
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