"The Facts Are the Facts"
Tom Homan just doesn't want you to know them.
63 year-old Trump Border Czar Tom Homan learned of the 13th death in ICE custody this fiscal year as he stood before a gaggle of reporters outside the White House yesterday. Baking under a harsh summer sun that turned his scalp bright red, the news did not faze him. He had no follow-up questions about it, no condolences for the man’s family, and no regrets for the loss of life.
“The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference,” a holocaust survivor once wrote.
Homan could not have been more indifferent to the news, offering the Joni Ernstiest answer you could give:
“I’m unaware of that. I’m not aware of that. I mean, people die in ICE custody. People die in county jails. People die in state prisons.”
Tom Homan, on the latest death in ICE custody
The man who died, 75 year-old Cuban national Isidro Perez, had lived in the U.S. since Homan was three years old. He’d found a life in the Miami area despite his early 1980s marijuana convictions. Perez continued that life even as Homan received the Presidential Rank Award for deporting people as head of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) under Obama, who promised, deceptively, to target “felons, not families” after being dubbed Deporter-in-Chief thanks to Homan’s handiwork.
Perez also survived the first year-and-a-half of Trump I, when Homan was ICE’s Acting Director.
But on June 5, “during a law enforcement encounter in Key Largo,” ICE arrested Perez. By June 26, he was in the medical unit complaining of chest pains at the Krome Service Processing Center—a facility that’s seen more people die (4 of 13, or 30%) in ICE custody than anywhere else this fiscal year.
Krome’s contractor, Alaska Native Tribal Corporation Akima, run by a white Wharton grad in Virginia, answers to the Miami ICE ERO Field Office, which has witnessed more deaths in custody (6 of 13- or 46.1%) than any other field office. By 8:42 p.m., Perez would be pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Four days and a barrage of Congressional and media notifications later, Homan told reporters he was still unaware the death occurred.
Homan’s reaction should haunt us all, because indifference is what fuels industrial-scale state-sanctioned death. Miami ERO will soon administer whatever legal rights (“if they have that”) the Trump regime chooses to offer people imprisoned in the forthcoming Florida concentration camp gleefully labeled “Alligator Alley.”
Homan’s response is also highly instructive for those seeking to meaningfully interrupt these harms and protect any lingering sense of humanity. His callous indifference invites every member of the press and everyone his message reaches to simply accept the inevitability of deaths in custody as perfectly natural, unavoidable occurrences.
Though he fielded multiple follow-up questions about Iran, ranging from an alleged fatwah from Iranian ayatollahs to the idea that “sleeper cells” are lying in wait, not a single journalist dared question his edict about deaths in custody.
“People die in ICE custody.” Now give us more money.
“How Many Lives Does ICE Save?”
Homan’s 18-month tenure as ICE director saw 17 acknowledged deaths in ICE custody. To this day, ICE cannot say whether the first death under Homan, that of 47 year-old Jamaican Roger Rayson in a solitary confinement cell at the facility that until recently held Mahmoud Khalil, was a homicide. After Rayson’s death, ICE stopped publishing detainee death reports on its website, forcing families to spend years suing under FOIA to obtain them.
Homan’s consulting client, GEO, never faced a serious inquiry about Rayson’s demise, despite the findings of the IHSC Mortality Review. A Slate piece from June about an author’s recent visit to Jena helps explain why. To this day, Homan and ICE cannot tell Americans if government contractors murdered Roger Rayson. It’s not that they’re invested in covering it up. It’s that they simply do not care, and no one really cares to ask. They are indifferent because they can be.
Rather than acknowledging his track record of carceral death-making—something the House Oversight Majority did in 2020, Homan does what he often does in these settings: he pivoted to the perceived heroism of people he can’t even rule out as murderers and offers a fictitious, grateful immigrant as the beneficiary of their compassion.
Claiming, falsely, so far as FOIA records reveal, that he looked into ICE deaths when he was Director, Homan asks—but does not answer—“how many lives does ICE save?”
Here, he’s channeling fascist Jack Donaghy, “You know how the media are. They wait for a mistake and that’s all you are. It happened to Hitler. No one eeeeeever talks about his paintings.”
Homan knows the people arrested and incarcerated by his agency typically have poorer access to medical care, leading them to go without treatment for serious conditions. (Which is odd, in light of the frothy claims by the current Senate majority that they’re all on Medicaid.) So detention is actually a favor to these poor souls, and you should be talking more about how lucky they are.
In Homan’s stunted moral calculus, if ICE provides legally required medical care to people it’s depriving of liberty for profit, the agency should be praised; but if it fails to provide that care, and someone dies, well, that’s just part of the ‘industry.’ Give us more money.
“The Highest Detention Standards in the Industry”
Homan’s next pivot from Perez’s death is where the mask comes all the way off. This happens in three ways. First, he acknowledges that detention is part of an “industry” that includes prisons and jails, and then positions ICE detention centers as being markedly better than those purported comparators. This acknowledgement is significant because it perfectly encapsulates how meaningless the nominal “civil” character of immigration detention really is.
People detained by ICE enjoy almost none of the constitutional rights of pre-trial criminal detainees and sentence-servers have:
access to paid attorneys if they can’t afford them
a prompt probable cause hearing before a neutral magistrate where the government bears the burden of justifying the legality of their detention
a right to bail in if the government cannot show they’re a flight risk or danger to the community
a right to a statute of limitations on their alleged offenses
the right to a trial by jury
the right to confront witnesses against them
the right to not be charged based on inadmissible hearsay
the right to appeal to an actual court
the right to see and examine all of the evidence against them
the right not to have the legal regime under which they must defend themselves erased in the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen
the right against prosecution under ex post facto laws
the right to proportionality
the presumptive right to suppress illegally gathered evidence
the right to be free from indefinite detention
To name just a few. Following Arendt’s analysis, modern U.S. authoritarianism made manifest in immigration detention deprives accused non-citizens of the “right to have rights.”
This 19th century judicially imposed pretense of “civility” works to erase the formal constitutional rights of the civil detained, while its practical reality leaves them in no better position than the criminally charged or condemned. That is the “industry” that pays and now works for Tom Homan.
The truth is that ICE detention facilities have higher standards because that’s what the law requires. It’s not a brag. It’s a mandate. They do it not out of generosity, but out of a need to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of a judiciary that’s allowed them to strip nearly every other constitutional right incarcerated people enjoy on the false promise that the detention conditions are in some way better, because the standards are legally required to be higher.
The second mask-off implication of Homan’s “industry standards” framing is his focus on the formal promises of the standards without acknowledging practical reality that ICE does not enforce them. The archives of this publication are overflowing with examples of instances where ICE, DHS-OIG, DHS-CRCL, federal courts, and even criminal investigators have concluded facilities violated these supposedly lofty detention standards, only to be rewarded with more money and absolute impunity. To name just a random few:
The Baker County Detention Center in MacClenny, Florida not only kept its contract but got a better one from ICE after a guard was convicted of raping a woman detained there for ICE, where the evidence at trial showed serial falsification of visual checks allowed him to do so because he knew he wouldn’t be watched. Two men died at Baker for lack of supervision and care. The standards were meaningless.
The Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia has been found responsible by ICE’s own contracting officers and mortality reviewers for multiple deaths. The contractor paid a small penalty, equivalent to about what its executives have yielded in stock sales since Trump’s election, and the facility keeps going on killing.
The Torrance County Detention Center in Estancia, New Mexico was supposed to have been depopulated following an unannounced inspection by DHS-OIG. ICE conducted a new, sham investigation, and concluded the OIG’s concerns were overblown. Then a man died by suicide, and it was in fact depopulated. Once again, however, ICE orchestrated a second sham inspection and filled it right back up.
A federal judge concluded the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington illegally used food as a reward or punishment to coerced detained immigrants to work for less than the state-mandated minimum wage, with the company running it removing that requirement in the ICE standards from its local facility SOPs. Yet immediately after the verdict, ICE allowed the company to suspend its work program rather than pay minimum wage, and gave it more money to avoid compliance with health and safety standards.
I really could go on and on. But the point is Homan is misleading the press by focusing on standards rather than standards compliance, on the imaginary state of things rather than the practical reality of impunity, and nobody at the White House knew enough to call bullshit in the moment. Standards that aren’t enforced are meaningless cover for death-making and harm.
The third point here is that ICE has fully abandoned those standards, as Homan effectively admits in thanking the Governor of Florida for creating a pop-up tent camp in a swamp. Which ICE inspections occurred before they began construction on the “One-Stop-Shop” for deportations? Which set of standards applies? And more to the point: Which judge would allow a prison or jail to create a facility like the one the President will soon visit? None. The standards, inspections, and assurances of compliance are pure, counterinsurgent fiction. The bodies piling up in places like Krome are not.
“Go Look for Yourselves, Then Come Talk to Me.”
Homan invites the media to “go look for yourselves, then come talk to me.” They should take him up on that. Go with a camera crew to the gate of any ICE detention center in the U.S. and tell them Tom Homan sent you to look for yourself. See what happens.
Unless you’re a Member of Congress who’s willing to be charged with cooked up crimes, the answer is that you’ll be escorted off the premises.
Homan describes Delaney Hall as the “cleanest” facility in New Jersey. And that may well be true. The fourth person who escaped from Delaney after pushing over one of those very clean walls that GEO wouldn’t let the City inspect is still at large, so Delaney Hall was a really odd choice of an example—made even odder by his financial ties to its owners.
Still, I would encourage people to ask Homan anytime he’s in front of a camera, and to ask anyone pushing for the expansion of this system he advocates, to take him up on his offer to “go look for yourselves,” and then go talk to him.
“More Beds”
To Homan, deportation requires detention. He pivots from not knowing about a person’s death to saying how much ICE needs “more beds.”
He’s quite clear about why this is—and it’s not because people are flight risks or dangers to the community, or because of some national emergency borne of an invasion, which he explains is over, relying on the low number of “gotaways” at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s because he wants all of the people ICE is targeted to go before immigration judges (or not) and be deported immediately before power changes hands and a Democratic president can “grant amnesty.”
“They play the long game. Let’s leave thousands of empty ICE beds, already paid for, let’s leave them empty. Let’s give these people to NGOS. That pushes the hearing out 3, 5, 7 years. What happens then? What they’re hoping happens then? There’s a Democratic administration that awards amnesty to millions of people.”
Would but that Democrats were the amnesty-awarding boogeymen he fantasizes about.
Still, Homan’s push for more ICE beds is a push to accelerate the deportation of everyone they’ve targeted. What he does not acknowledge here is that even following the laws in place at the time—laws like CNHV, TPS, naturalization, birthright citizenship.—will not protect you from Tom Homan. They’re not simply enforcing the laws. They’re changing the ones they don’t like to create demand for bed space.
And by the way, enforcing the laws would also require the state to prevent preventable deaths in custody, and protect incarcerated people from wanton cruelty. Cruelty like being stuck in a trailer in a swamp during hurricane season with now way out.
Homan is right on one count: “The facts are the facts.” It’s just a shame nobody with a microphone, a camera, or a notepad knows enough to confront him with them.
That’s changing, though. You cannot engage in this level of repression without also sparking curiosity, education, and outrage that ultimately fuels action.
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