Border czar Tom Homan’s speech at this weekend’s Turning Point USA convention was interrupted by a heckler who seemed to draw attention to the administration’s spurious efforts to justify its deportation campaign.
“Are you an MS-13 member?” a man shouted from the audience.
Sporting a T-shirt that read, “I IDENTIFY AS ULTRA MAGA,” and a Trump 2024 campaign hat, the heckler brandished a large poster depicting Homan with “MS-13” digitally added onto his knuckles—seemingly a reference to the Trump administration’s dubious attempts to frame Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador, as a leader of the criminal gang.
During the Trump administration’s scramble to tie Abrego Garcia to MS-13, one purported piece of evidence it invoked was an image of four tattooed symbols on the man’s fingers.
The Trump administration took the questionable position that the four symbols represented “M,” “S,” “1,” and “3,” and the White House accordingly published an image in which the tattoos were digitally annotated with text reading “MS-13.” Trump, however—in a moment revealing either his characteristic penchant for lying or his digital illiteracy—insisted that plainly photoshopped characters were the actual tattoos themselves.
At the summit on Saturday, Homan laid into the heckler, who also was jeered by conservative convention-goers as he was escorted out.
“Why don’t you come up here and hand me that picture?” Homan asked, before beginning a “USA” chant with the crowd.
“They got morons like this all over the country,” Homan continued. “This guy wouldn’t know what it’s like to serve this nation. This guy ain’t got the balls to be an ICE officer. He hasn’t got the balls to be a border patrol agent.”
“If you’re such a badass, meet me off stage in 13 minutes and 50 seconds,” Homan said, as well as hurling a number of insults (“I guarantee you he sits down to pee,” “This guy lives in his mother’s basement,” and “The only thing that surprises me is you don’t have purple hair and a nose ring.”)
After the brief interruption, Homan continued to tout the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. The border czar’s other recent defenses include a Friday appearance on Fox News, in which he seemed to advocate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement practicing racial profiling.
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