President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, denied accusations of racial profiling when carrying out the administration’s mass deportation agenda despite the Supreme Court opening the door last year for ICE to use certain racial factors as grounds for immigration stops.
Homan was responding to comments made by Democratic Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon.
“We’re Black, [ICE is] gonna profile us, too,” Nixon said on the “Miami Community Newspapers Podcast.”
“They can’t tell the difference between an African-American or, you know, a Black American that is a descendant of slaves here in this country, or someone from Jamaica or Nigeria. Like, they are going to racially profile us, and they are going to escalate things, and they are going to shoot and kill us,” she continued.
When asked by Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany on Saturday about Nixon’s comment she called them a “ridiculous statement.”
“Look, we don’t racially profile. Everybody we talk to we have reasonable suspicion of aliens to talk to them. And to arrest them, we need probable cause,” Homan said. “That’s what the law says and that’s we do. We don’t arrest people based on the color of their skin.”
Homan then called himself an “equal opportunity deporter.”
“I deported people to 180 countries last year. So, I don’t care if you’re from Asia, you’re from Europe, or you’re from other countries. If you’re in the country illegally, you’ll be deported, regardless of the color of your skin,” Homan said.
Despite Homan’s comments, the Trump administration explicitly asked the Supreme Court last year to block a lower court’s order prohibiting immigration officers in Los Angeles from using racially loaded factors as justification for arrests.
The 6-3 decision in Perdomo v. Noem reversed a lower court’s ruling that prevented officers from considering factors such as apparent ethnicity, language spoken or accent, presence at a location where immigrants were believed to gather, or working in a particular kind of job, when making arrests.
Homan’s statements on Saturday run contrary to the high court’s ruling, as it found that agents may rely solely on just one of the four aforementioned factors, without any other “reasonable suspicion.”
Watch Homan’s full comments on Fox News’ “Saturday In America” here:
