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Border czar Tom Homan is doubling down on his claim that the recent fatal shootings involving ICE officers would not have happened if the victims had just obeyed law enforcement.
“It comes down to one simple fact ― these people failed to comply with law enforcement,” he said while speaking to reporters outside of the White House on Monday about ICE’s mass arrests and deportations.
“All they had to do is simply comply with law enforcement,” Homan said. “If you don’t like what law enforcement did to you, then go to the courts, sue, call the ACLU. Do whatever you wanna do, but you should always comply with law enforcement. If they did, they’d be alive today.”
In the last two weeks, two men have been killed in their vehicles by ICE agents. Last week, Joan Sebastián Guerrero, a 25-year-old father from Colombia, was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Maine. The incident occurred just six days after ICE officers fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three and longtime Houston resident, in Texas.
Federal immigration officers have fatally shot at least 11 people since the start of President Donald Trump’s deportation crackdown, with the majority of these lethal encounters involving agents firing into moving vehicles.
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Homan made the same argument on Sunday on “Face the Nation,” saying that anti-ICE sentiment had emboldened people to not comply with law enforcement.
“They would be alive today if they simply complied with a vehicle stop by federal law enforcement. Just comply,” he told host Margaret Brennan.
In the case of Salgado Araujo, federal agents alleged he “weaponized” his vehicle and attempted to run over ICE officers — a claim the department has regularly made following such shootings. Similar claims from immigration agents have frequently turnedout to be false.
Salgado Araujo’s family and co-workers dispute that, saying he feared he was being targeted by criminals looking to steal his work tools because the agents were in unmarked vehicles.
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Citing the case, Brennan asked Homan how people were supposed to respond in situations where there was little or no indication that ICE officers were law enforcement.
When Homan argued that the man still should have responded to the vehicle’s emergency lights, Brennan pointed out that no emergency lights were visible in video of the Houston incident, and there was no body camera footage corroborating his claim. Homan said he hadn’t seen the footage Brennan referred to.
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What the law says about complying with law enforcement
Immigration law experts said Homan’s characterization of fatal ICE encounters left out key legal and factual nuances.
“ICE and other federal immigration agents have made quick compliance difficult or impossible,” said Hiroshi Motomura, a professor of immigration and citizenship law at the UCLA School of Law and the author of “Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy.”
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“Many agents aren’t identifying themselves in any trustworthy way; they often operate unmarked vehicles, and they wear masks,” he told HuffPost. “Imagine you’re driving or walking down the street and masked people confront you. You don’t know if you’re being arrested or robbed.”
Motomura said the more basic issue was that ICE had fostered such widespread fear in many communities that it had eroded confidence that immigration enforcement operates under the same protocols police officers are generally trained to follow.
“It’s only natural for people to not comply as quickly as officers might like,” he said. “In these moments of apprehension and fear, some officers seem to be escalating into violence.”
According to Department of Homeland Security regulations, an officer may only use deadly force if he or she “has reasonable grounds to believe that such force is necessary to protect the designated immigration officer or other persons from the imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.”
The U.S. Constitution and state constitutions also establish rules to make sure that law enforcement respects legal constraints on stops, arrests, seizures and the use of force, Motomura said.
“Tom Homan’s statement suggests that those legal rules don’t matter to him,” Motomura said.
Josh Parker, the deputy director of policy at the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, said Homan’s comments were “abhorrent” and “repugnant for a law enforcement leader in an authoritarian country” to say, “let alone a constitutional democracy.”
Under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, no law enforcement or immigration officer is permitted to use force that could seriously injure or kill someone unless the force was objectively reasonable and the person subject to force posed an imminent threat of serious bodily harm to the officer or others.
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“Many states and law enforcement agencies across the country adhere to commonly accepted practices, and only allow the use of deadly force when there is no reasonable alternative, and only after officers have first tried to use de-escalation measures, if feasible, and warned the subject they were going to use deadly force before doing so,” Parker said.
“By suggesting otherwise, Homan is endorsing flagrant constitutional violations that needlessly endanger the lives of members of the public,” he added.
These comments reflect the administration’s willingness to deflect attention from the real concern – the risk to public safety and violation of constitutional rights occurring as a result of indiscriminate immigration enforcement and the use of dangerous tactics to meet daily arrest quotas, according to Stacy Brustin, a professor emerita and director of the Immigration Law & Policy Initiative at Catholic Law in Washington, D.C.
“Rather than halting traffic-related enforcement tactics pending independent investigations of recent fatalities, the administration is now shifting blame to the victims,” Brustin told HuffPost.
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“The failure to issue body cameras to all DHS and other federal personnel engaged in immigration enforcement has facilitated a lack of accountability and made it much more difficult to corroborate officers’ accounts of the shootings,” she added.
All of this raises serious civil liberties concerns, Motomura said. As seen in Minneapolis with the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, aggressive immigration enforcement doesn’t just affect noncitizens.
“All community members, citizens and noncitizens alike, are caught in the crosshairs,” he said.
