There's no question who's in charge

Just after 1 p.m. this afternoon, Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s “Border Czar,” adjusted his suit jacket, unbuttoned the top button, and walked directly toward the press gathered on the “Pebble Beach” area of the White House North Lawn driveway. He was there to get ahead of two stories rapidly consuming the day’s headlines: the morning attack outside New York’s 26 Federal Plaza, home to an ICE field office, and the growing scrutiny surrounding a series of fatal ICE shootings that have sparked new questions about the agency’s tactics, training, and accountability.

When asked whether ICE needed to change the way it trains its agents, Homan brushed aside the question with a lengthy response, eventually insisting, “All they had to do is simply comply with law enforcement,” referring to the men killed during recent ICE encounters.

During the 13 minutes and 27 seconds that Homan spent speaking to the press, he grew visibly more agitated with every question until he could no longer keep the conversation focused where he wanted it. He eventually became overwhelmed by his emotions and blurted out, “I can’t even go get a quart of milk at a grocery store without a security detail. Why? Because I’m enforcing laws of this country. It’s pathetic, and it’s disgusting,” before abruptly walking away without so much as a glance back at the reporters still waiting to ask more questions.

It was all a performance. Homan came to that driveway with a script. He wanted to talk about body cameras and arrest numbers. He wanted to convince the country that ICE agents are “mom and dads” who fight for their country every day. He wanted to use the Federal Plaza attack, a man who set fire to the steps of a federal building in Manhattan this morning using fireworks and gasoline, as proof that his agents are the real victims. And he might have gotten away with it, if not for the reporters who kept asking questions about issues like why the administration gutted the very body camera program it now claims to support, and about why a man whose own ex-wife raised concerns about his fitness for the job was ever given a badge and a gun in the first place. And Homan, unable to answer any of them, did what people like him always do when the truth gets too close. He lashed out, blamed everyone else, and then he left.

The Federal Plaza attack earlier this morning was a launching pad for everything Holman wanted to say. What we know so far is that the suspect, Andrew Arrabaca, launched fireworks at a federal building, poured gasoline on its steps, and set them on fire. Three people were injured. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating. Violence is always wrong, and it should be condemned without qualification. And what Homan did with that attack is what this administration always does. He weaponized it. He said he would not comment because it was too early, then immediately commented, calling it “just another example of someone attacking ICE because of the constant mis-messaging and vilification of the men and women of ICE.” In a single breath, he turned a criminal act into a political indictment of everyone who has ever questioned how ICE operates. And he used it as the emotional backdrop for every answer that followed, so that every question about ICE accountability could be heard not as journalism but as an extension of the violence his agents face. The question we have to ask is not who lit that fire this morning. The question is who has been raising the temperature in our country, and the answer is standing on the White House driveway.

But before he stormed off, Homan said something that will matter far longer than his outbursts. Asked to describe the difference between his role and that of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a question he tried to dodge twice, Homan finally answered: “I’m here; I help Steven Miller. We we, we develop strategies to send down to the programs for implementation.” On camera, from the White House driveway, the man running the largest domestic enforcement operation in modern American history confirmed what reporters have been piecing together for over a year: Stephen Miller is the architect. Tom Homan is the enforcer. And Markwayne Mullin, like Kristi Noem before him, is just the yes man.

Stephen Miller was never confirmed by the Senate. He holds no title that required a vote. He is Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, an unelected adviser who has, by every credible account, seized control of immigration enforcement in this country. It’s been reported that he runs daily conference calls at ten in the morning, including Saturdays, where he demands arrest numbers, deportation figures, and detention capacity updates from every relevant agency. The Atlantic described him running those calls “less like a government adviser and more like a wartime general.” One senior official who participates told The Atlantic, “He pushes everybody to the absolute limit because he knows that the clock is ticking.” Another said, “He gets on the phone and he yells at everybody. Nobody is spared from his wrath.” He demanded that ICE hit three thousand arrests per day. When the numbers did not move fast enough, he called an emergency meeting with ICE’s top fifty field office directors and told them, according to The Wall Street Journal, to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” He directed agents to target Home Depot parking lots where day laborers gather for work. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons was hospitalized at least twice due to stress-related episodes brought on by the pressure, and had to be relieved of duty during the Los Angeles operations. A source on those calls told the Daily Mail, “Stephen was just crushing him.”

After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Miller went on Fox News and addressed every ICE officer in the country directly. “To all ICE officers,” he said. “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony.” Legal experts called it “utterly chilling.” Critics called it a greenlight for abuse, an open invitation for agents to act without fear of consequence. And that is exactly what has happened.

Steve Bannon called Miller Trump’s “prime minister.” Trump himself said Miller is “at the top of the totem pole.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Atlantic, “He oversees every policy the administration touches. I can’t tell you the number of times a policy matter is discussed in the Oval and Trump will say, ‘Where’s Stephen? Tell him to get that done.’” This is the man Homan just confirmed he works for. Not the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the President. Stephen Miller.

When a reporter asked about the ICE officer in Maine whose own ex-wife has publicly raised concerns that he had severe mental health challenges that would not be compatible with the work of any law enforcement agency, let alone one conducting armed vehicle stops on American streets, Homan shut it down: “That’s a question for ICE. That’s under investigation.” When another reporter asked whether the administration is more concerned about the quantity of ICE operations than the quality, Homan could not even bring himself to answer directly. “I can’t speak for everybody in the administration,” he said, “but quality agents are very important.” He cannot speak for everyone in the administration. Because the administration’s priority has never been quality. It has been volume.

Homan said something else on that driveway that he clearly did not intend to become the headline. When a reporter pressed him on the Democrats’ claims about what went wrong in Minnesota, the operation that resulted in the deaths of two American citizens, Homan responded: “All the mistakes they say happened in Minnesota… I don’t think (they were) mistakes.” What Homan was saying, even as his words tripped over themselves, was clear: the killings were not errors. They were the expected output of the system they built.

He tried to walk it back moments later, acknowledging the operation “was not perfect” and that he had problems with the “targeting” and “chains of command.” But you cannot hold both positions. You cannot tell the country that the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not mistakes and then say the operation was imperfect. What he said tells us everything about how this operation views human life.

And then came the heartbreaking claim. “All they had to do is simply comply with law enforcement,” Homan said. “If they did, they’d be alive today.” Comply or die. That is the operating principle of the United States government’s immigration enforcement. But the videos tell a different story. The majority showed compliance, and it did not matter.

Throughout the gaggle, Homan referred to the people ICE is targeting as “aliens.” Not undocumented immigrants. Not migrants. Aliens. He dehumanized them and used the language of invasion. It is designed to make us picture something other than a person, something foreign, something threatening, something that does not belong. It is the same rhetorical trick authoritarian movements have used for a century: strip the humanity from the target before you strip their rights. When they are “aliens,” it becomes easier to accept that they can be arrested without body cameras, deported to countries they have never lived in, or shot during a traffic stop and blamed for their own death.

And that is the part we are still not talking about enough. This operation is not just arresting and deporting people. It is kidnapping them and sending them to third countries, not their countries of origin, but third countries. People whose offense is being in the country without documentation, often a civil violation equivalent to jaywalking, are being sent to El Salvador torture prisons. We still do not have those people back. We do not know what has happened to them. Their families do not know where they are. And the administration does not care, because to them, these are not people. They are “aliens.”

And underneath all of it sits something even darker. The man delivering this performance, the man telling America that ICE agents are heroes who “don’t hang their heart on a hook every day to do this job,” is himself the subject of one of the most damning corruption allegations in modern federal law enforcement. Between Trump’s two terms, Homan launched a consulting firm called Homeland Strategic Consulting, which boasted on its website about “a proven track record of opening doors and bringing successful relationships to our clients, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts to private companies.” He earned three hundred and sixty thousand dollars in consulting fees. He was paid by GEO Group, the private prison giant that operates immigrant detention facilities across the country. And on September twentieth, 2024, six weeks before the election, the FBI recorded Homan on hidden cameras accepting fifty thousand dollars in cash, inside a bag from the fast-casual restaurant chain Cava, from undercover agents posing as government contractors. He had indicated he could help them win contracts in a second Trump administration.

The FBI planned to wait and see if Homan would follow through on the alleged promise once he took office. But the investigation stalled the moment Trump was inaugurated. Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal lawyer turned acting deputy attorney general, called it a “deep state” probe. Trump appointees officially closed the case. The recordings have never been released. Congressional Democrats demanded them. They were ignored.

Homan’s denials evolved. First it was, “I did nothing criminal.” Then it became, “I didn’t take fifty thousand dollars from anybody.” The White House said he “never took the fifty thousand.” Vice President Vance defended him while sidestepping whether the payment was accepted at all. And while all of this was unfolding, GEO Group, Homan’s former client, entered new contracts worth over one hundred and thirty million dollars with ICE in 2025 and projected that increased detention could generate between five hundred million and six hundred million dollars for the company annually.

Every word Homan spoke on that driveway today was aimed at one audience: the voters who will decide the midterms. The frame he is building is simple. ICE agents are under attack. Democrats and the media are getting people killed with their rhetoric. The only solution is more agents, more power, and for us to leave ICE alone and stop talking about the atrocities they are committing. Because in their eyes, if you question any of it, you are putting officers’ lives at risk. That is the frame they intend to carry through November.

But the frame they are terrified of is the one that keeps breaking through: unqualified agents are killing people because an unelected ideologue demanded impossible quotas, the man translating those quotas into operations is credibly accused of taking bribes, the body cameras that might have told the truth were deliberately withheld, and the entire apparatus exists not to protect the country but to enrich private contractors and consolidate political power. That is the truth underneath the performance. And every question those reporters asked today brought it one inch closer to the surface.

While listening to him talk, I kept thinking about what this one man is the face of and what it is doing to communities across our country and to our children. The sweeps have gotten quieter since the early months. They are not on the news the way Minneapolis and Los Angeles were. But they have not stopped. They are moving through more and more neighborhoods, including mine, where unmarked cars circle and the fear settles in without a single headline being written about it. You see them, and you wonder who they will grab, because the reality is they can grab anyone. They have. And it is not just the arrest that does the damage. It is the in-between. The father who stops walking his kids to school. The mother who skips the grocery store. The teenager who watches the vehicles and wonders if today is the day someone does not come home.

Our children have already been through enough. They lost years of their childhood to a pandemic, separated from friends, classrooms, graduations, and so many of the moments that were supposed to shape them. We asked them to make those sacrifices because we believed it was necessary to protect one another. That crisis was real. It was largely out of our hands once it began to spread.

This is different. This does not have to happen. There is no national emergency demanding that masked agents patrol our communities, that families live in fear, or that children grow up believing this is simply what America looks like. This fear is being manufactured by one man’s ego and sustained by a Congress that refuses to do its job. And every day lawmakers continue to fund this machine instead of dismantling it, they are telling our children that this is normal. That this is what America is now. That armed federal agents confronting people in our neighborhoods, and deadly encounters that follow, are simply the way government operates. They are wrong. This is not who we are. And it does not have to be who we become.

I find myself grasping to small comforts to get through the day. One of them is this: Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Markwayne Mullin, and the others do not have presidential immunity. None of the people executing this operation, setting the quotas, stripping the oversight, and sending people to foreign torture prisons do. None of them are protected by the shield that covers the presidency. They seem to forget that. They act as though the power they wield right now will protect them forever. It will not. There will be a reckoning, hearings, and investigations. They are building their own case files. They just do not realize it yet. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: My daughter made a friend tonight. Thankfully, they were on their way to a different destination and didn’t hang out too long.

Sources:

WATCH: Homan says people killed in fatal ICE shootings ‘failed to comply with law enforcement‘: PBS NewsHour YouTube Video

https://abcnews.com/Politics/homan-body-cameras-ice-officers-scrutiny-mounts/story?id=134929103

https://abcnews.com/US/man-custody-after-setting-off-incendiary-device-federal/story?id=134916208

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/17/nx-s1-5897460/maine-ice-shooting-brouillette

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/07/us/houston-ice-shooting-death

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/29/politics/stephen-miller-trump-immigration-minneapolis

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-aide-homan-accepted-50000-bribery-sting-operation-sources-say

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/09/22/border-czar-bribery-allegations-the-controversy-around-the-dojs-dropped-investigation-into-tom-homan-explained/

https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/11/12/us/el-salvador-torture-of-venezuelan-deportees

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kristi-noem-out-as-secretary-of-homeland-security-markwayne-mullin/

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/immigration-ice-deportations-stephen-miller