As federal agents swept through Colony Ridge, north of Houston, on Monday to keep President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant attacks in the headlines, Governor Greg Abbott wanted to make sure he gets some of the credit. “I have worked with Tom Homan on this for months,” he wrote on X.
So it’s a good moment for Texans to remember what “border czar” Thomas Homan stands for.
In 2019, Homan was offended that Mexican-American Congressman Jesús Garcia (D-Ill.) suggested he didn’t “care about dying children and [that] I’m a racist.” Homan’s impulse was toward violence. He told Fox, “I hesitated a minute before I started yelling because I actually think about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room.”
Homan is a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
According to The Hill, Homan’s “tenure at the top of ICE [during the first Trump administration] was seen as a boon for the agency’s chronic employee morale problem.”
That’s because good morale at ICE has always meant the arbitrary exercise of authority, including sexual abuse of prisoners, freedom to use excessive force, and a minimum of oversight. These are what the oft-quoted “taking the shackles off” ICE really means.
ICE detainees in actual shackles on a recent deportation flight to Brazil pleaded for local police to protect them — from ICE agents. In Columbia and India, officials protested the mistreatment of their citizens by U.S. immigration agents, including the Trump administration falsely labeling them as criminals.
Lies about immigrants and crime have always been crucial to justifying the mistreatment which is part-and-parcel of ICE detention. And in February, Texas held a fourth of the nation’s 38,919 detainees. (This number does not include Guantánamo detainees.)
In the pre-vaccine days of COVID, Department of Homeland Security medical experts and even ICE detention officers favored releasing non-dangerous detainees from crowded lock-ups to slow the spread of the virus. Homan, as a Fox News commentator, ignored the real threat to ICE staff, local communities, and the prisoners, claiming that releases “would endanger public safety by releasing detainees with violent criminal records.” In fact, as former ICE Director John Sandweg pointed out, “only a small percentage [of detainees] pose any public safety threat” — and those would remain confined.
The scare-tactic about immigrant crime was no accident. The Texas Observer has detailed Homan’s pre-election involvement in disinformation about border “invasions” and crime, which helped lay the foundation for the promised attacks now unfolding against immigrant communities.
With Governor Abbott’s help, ICE’s “multi-agency enforcement operation” reportedly arrested 118 people in Colony Ridge on Monday. But the goals of “mass deportation” are bigger than the numbers: destruction of families, infliction of racist cruelty, and widespread dehumanization, all in the guise of immigration policy.
Homan recently told the Washington Examiner, “ICE is going to do what they’re good at.” He was right about that.
