Thomas Homan, the Trump administration’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from January 2017 to June 2018, helped to transform the agency into an arm of Donald Trump’s nativist agenda. During his 17 months, ICE escalated its
terror tactics against
immigrant communities, https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/human-rights-groups-allege-ice-private-detention-companies-provide-poor-care-to-lgbtq-migrants-and-those-with-hiv/2019/09/25/a4f3747c-dfc9-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html (tormented) thousands of individuals in ICE custody, and
lied to federal courts.
On Thursday, asked to answer for his agency’s conduct and policies in a congressional hearing, he responded with a meltdown that perfectly captured a lawless organization’s rejection of any rules or authority that might limit its power.
Thursday’s https://judiciary.house.gov/subcommittees/immigration-and-border-security-116th-congress (hearing) before the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship focused on ICE detention centers, a hotbed of human rights abuses. More than
50,000 immigrants are currently being held in ICE custody, with private, for-profit prisons housing nearly three-fourths of them. Reports issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General in
June 2019 and
September 2018 found that ICE facilities are filthy, brutal, and dangerous.
Immigrants, including children, are routinely denied access to medical care. They are forced to live in filthy conditions, given food that is expired and unsafe, denied hygiene items like toothbrushes and soap, and denied recreation and visitation. Detainees are illegally placed in solitary confinement and strip-searched. At one facility, inspectors found nooses in 15 different cells.
At least 24 immigrants have died in ICE detention under Trump.
...
These incidents demonstrate how ICE operated under Homan’s watch. Agents felt free to illegally detain immigrants, then deceive courts to secure their deportation. They treated their targets as legal nonpersons, in a crusade to detain and deport as many as possible. ICE has
gone after lawful immigrants, too, attempting to revoke their green cards for no good reason.
Homan
claimed he simply
sought to enforce the laws on the books. But when state legislators began to limit local law enforcement’s ability to cooperate with ICE, Homan
announced on Fox News that those lawmakers should be charged with crimes.
The first wave of coverage of Homan’s outburst Thursday came from right-wing media, praising his defiance. It was pure Trumpism, the elevation of culture war over the basic constitutional order. Thomas Homan does not recognize the authority of Pramila Jayapal or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He does not think he has to follow their rules. He does not believe that two women of color have any right to hold power over him.
“You work for me!” the former government employee screamed at an elected member of the government. He is a man who is used to wielding power against people who look like Jayapal and Ocasio-Cortez. He is the embodiment of ICE under Trump, certain—as so many ICE officers are—that he answers to no one.