Immigration Czar Tom Homan just enthusiastically confirmed what we already knew: ICE is using indiscriminate racial profiling tactics to detain immigrants.
“People need to understand, ICE officers and border patrol, they don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain ‘em and question ‘em,” Homan said when asked about a Los Angeles federal judge issuing a temporary restraining order on his west coast immigration crackdown. “Get our typical facts based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions … agents are trained what they need to detain somebody temporarily and question them is not probable cause, it’s reasonable suspicion. We’re trained on that. Every agent gets 4th amendment training over and over again.”
What does the federal government think an immigrant looks like? Homan is essentially saying that ICE has the right to kidnap and question any Latino person they happen upon. It’s easy to see why so many law-abiding communities and families have been living in abject fear for months, scared to go to work or school or, in some cases, even leave their homes.
Homan’s framing of probable cause and the 4th amendment is not new, nor is it unique to the Trump administration. Homan got his initial experience on this issue working for President Obama as ICE’s Executive Associate Director of Enforcement in 2014, the same year the Obama Administration reaffirmed the use of racial profiling by federal immigration agents because they couldn’t do their jobs “without taking ethnicity into account.”
While Homan’s current comments point to increased brutality in the near future, it’s important to remember how we got here if we want to move forward on immigration in a way that is actually humane, and not handled via a gestapo-style federal militia.
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