Tom Homan's Big Ask: Credit for Not Committing Crimes
The White House counteroffer on ICE accountability is mostly a restatement of federal law. Renee Good is still dead. The agents who terrorize America are still masked and anonymous.
WASHINGTON — The letter landed in congressional inboxes this week under two signatures — Tom Homan, the Border Czar, and James Braid, the White House legislative director. It was dressed up in the language of concession, of good faith, of bipartisan seriousness. Five bullet points. Five promises.
Read them slowly.
The administration promises to expand body cameras — except when it doesn’t, because undercover officers are exempt, and nobody who watched masked federal agents gun down Renee Good in Minneapolis is going to feel better about a carve-out that swallows the rule.
The administration promises to limit enforcement at sensitive locations like hospitals and schools — except for national security, except for flight risks, except for public safety. Which is to say: except whenever they decide they don’t want to.
Then there’s the fifth bullet point. Save it. Frame it. The administration has solemnly promised that it will not deport American citizens.
That is already a crime. It is called wrongful deportation. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii — a Democrat from Hawaii — did the math on the whole letter and concluded publicly that three of the five so-called concessions are simply commitments to follow existing federal law. “That isn’t a ‘concession to Democrats,’” Schatz wrote. “Hilariously and alarmingly the last bullet point is a commitment to NOT DEPORT AMERICANS which is already illegal.”
When your counteroffer requires a senator to point out that you have heroically promised not to commit a federal crime, the negotiations have not gone well for you.
White House Wants ICE Agents in Masks
Here is what Homan did not offer: He did not offer to unmask his agents.
That is the thing that matters most, and it is the thing that is not in the letter.
In Minneapolis, federal officers moved through American streets with their faces covered. There are photographs. There is video. Renee Good was shot. Alex Pretti was shot. The agents who pulled those triggers were, in some cases, not immediately identifiable by name, by badge, by agency, by anything a citizen has a right to know about the person pointing a weapon at them.
The White House says masks are a safety issue. Agents are under threat. The argument is that anonymity protects the protectors.
But anonymous power is not accountability. It is the other thing.
Every local police department in this country — every one that has reformed in the last decade — has learned the hard way that when you let officers hide their faces and their names, you do not get safer officers. You get bolder officers. You get officers who understand, on some cellular level, that no one is watching, and that no one will be able to say with certainty that they were there.
The White House counteroffer is a document about visibility that leaves the masks on.
“Hostage”
The letter closes with a warning. Democrats, it says, “must stop holding the safety and security of the American people hostage.”
Hostage. The word from a letter signed by a man who runs an agency that held Daphy Michel in a detention facility, released her, and sent her home to die.
The word from an administration whose agents detained Nashville journalist Estefany Rodríguez — press credentials and all — and let the machinery of enforcement grind while the country watched.
The word from Tom Homan, who spent years on television promising the most aggressive immigration enforcement operation in American history, and who now, when asked to put on paper what his agents may and may not do, produces a document that is mostly a restatement of laws already on the books.
Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries called it “incomplete and insufficient.” They said it contained “neither details nor legislative text.” They were being generous.
What Homan sent was not a counteroffer in any meaningful sense. It was a press release wearing a letter’s clothes. Five bullet points, three of which are existing law, one of which carves out the very situations the letter is supposed to address, and one — the last one, the signature — that promises not to do something that has already been illegal since before anyone reading this was born.
Renee Good was shot in January. The masks are still on. The agents who wore them have not been named in any binding accountability mechanism Homan’s letter would create.
That is the offer. That is the whole offer.
The people of Minneapolis — and Minneapolis is not the border, Minneapolis is a city in the middle of this country where Americans live — deserve better than a promise to follow the law.
They deserve to know who pulled the trigger.
More on Tom Homan—
BREAKING: TOM HOMAN CAUGHT IN BRIBERY SCHEME
WASHINGTON — Somewhere in Texas last fall, Tom Homan — the man who brags he’ll deport more people than anyone in history — sat across from two guys in suits and took a bag of money. Fifty thousand in…
I say counteroffer Tommy Homan another $50k for unmasking his ICE brigade. In a Hobby Lobby bag. At the proposed Arc de Trump site. His choice of marked or unmarked bills.
This is what happens when abuses are normalized - basic decency (or legality) becomes a condescension, a favor. Do something right, demand a parade is also a mainstay of toxic masculinity that probably every woman everywhere will recognize instantly.