The men and women of ICE strap on body armor every morning to do a job most Americans would never take.
Now they’re getting death threats at a rate nobody saw coming.
And Tom Homan just put the blame squarely where it belongs, and the numbers he dropped will make your blood boil.
Homan Calls Out the Rhetoric Putting Agents in Danger
White House Border Czar Tom Homan went on Fox News recently for an interview with Lara Trump on her show My View and didn’t hold back one bit.
Lara Trump asked Homan about Democrat politicians and their habit of branding immigration enforcement as racist, pointing specifically to the attacks on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin during recent congressional testimony.
“How do attacks like those impact the morale of the agents on the ground?” she asked. “The people who day in and day out are putting their lives on the line, because it’s not just that they are attacking Secretary Mullin — they are attacking the entire agency.”
Homan’s answer was direct. “I’m an equal opportunity deporter,” he said. “I don’t care what color they are or what country they’re from.”
He pointed out that ICE agents have removed illegal aliens from 161 different countries, including many from Asia and Europe. The racism charge, he made clear, doesn’t hold up against the facts.
But Homan wasn’t finished. He turned to what he called the real danger — the language coming from elected officials who compare federal law enforcement to the worst regimes in human history.
“When you keep using those [terms] — the Nazi, secret police, racist [claims] — that instills violence,” Homan said. “That’s why death threats against ICE officers are up 8,000%.”
The Numbers Behind the Outrage
That 8,000% figure isn’t something Homan invented for television. Back in January, DHS put out a statement confirming the staggering spike in threats against ICE agents and their families.
Then-DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin didn’t mince words in that statement. “Make no mistake, threatening rhetoric and this unprecedented violence against our law enforcement is incited by sanctuary politicians through their repeated vilification and demonization of law enforcement,” McLaughlin said. “Comparing ICE day in and day out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences.”
She continued: “The men and women of ICE are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. They get up every morning to try and make our communities safer. Like everyone else, we just want to go home to our families at night. The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop.”
And it’s not just death threats. DHS reported that assaults against ICE agents surged more than 1,300% as well. Think about that for a second. These are federal law enforcement officers being physically attacked at rates nobody in this country would have considered normal just a few years ago.
Who’s Doing the Comparing?
Homan named the problem plainly. When a U.S. senator, a congressman, a governor, or a mayor calls ICE agents Nazis and racists, it doesn’t stay in the hearing room. It travels. It reaches people who are already looking for permission to act on their rage.
“When a U.S. senator, or a congressman, or a governor, or a mayor can come out and call us Nazis, racists, secret police, that encourages these protests that turn violent,” Homan said. “And that small percentage of people on the left that are already nuts, that just gives… they feel empowered to do something about it.”
He made clear the threats don’t stop with the agents themselves. “And not just against the officers. Against their spouses and children. We’ve seen it. Doxing their children, doxing their spouses,” Homan added.
The examples aren’t hard to find. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker compared Trump’s ICE enforcement operations to Nazi Germany. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) compared ICE workers to the KKK. These aren’t fringe comments from anonymous accounts online. They’re coming from sitting elected officials with national platforms.
And someone is listening.
Real Consequences for Real People
There’s a certain kind of political cowardice that dresses itself up as moral courage. Calling a federal agent a Nazi from the safety of a congressional hearing room costs the speaker nothing. The agent going home to find his address posted online by strangers pays the price.
Homan has watched this play out long enough to be furious about it. He’s spent four decades in federal law enforcement, and he knows what it looks like when political rhetoric bleeds into physical danger for the people doing the actual work.
Earlier this year, a protester at the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, was caught on video threatening to kill an agent and his entire family. That’s not a protest. That’s what happens when you spend months telling people that ICE officers are the equivalent of history’s most notorious murderers.
Homan has also pushed back on the masks-versus-accountability argument that some critics have raised. “If you want ICE to take the masks off, the threat level has to decrease,” he said. “It’s up, 8,000% increase in threats against ICE officers, and that’s because a lot of the rhetoric coming from the Hill.”
He put it simply: “Stop calling ICE Nazis and racists. Stop saying they’re going to shoot people inside airports. That’s going to drive the threat level down, and we can talk about masks.”
The Broader Pattern
This isn’t the first time Homan has raised the alarm about political language crossing into dangerous territory. After a shooting in Minneapolis during an immigration enforcement operation, he made the same argument. “It’s another example of tragedy that follows the hateful rhetoric against ICE, calling them Nazis and racists and Gestapo,” Homan said at the time. “It just empowers those crazy people on the left… It justifies actions they want to take against ICE.”
But the left keeps doing it anyway. Because for a certain class of politician, the ability to fundraise off of outrage matters more than the safety of the federal agents enforcing laws that Congress itself passed.
Homan made that point too. “We got to work together at this, but ICE is doing the same thing they’ve done during 40 years I’ve been doing it,” he said. “They’re enforcing the laws they enacted. If they don’t like it, change the law. The law hasn’t changed. The difference is, under the last four years of Joe Biden, they weren’t enforcing the law.”
He added: “Now, ICE is actually enforcing the law, doing their job, and they don’t like it.”
That’s really what this is about. Democrats spent four years watching Biden leave the border wide open, and now that someone is actually doing the job, they’d rather call the agents Nazis than admit the policy failure that created the mess in the first place.
ICE agents didn’t write the immigration laws. Congress did. And the same members of Congress who voted for those laws are now comparing the people enforcing them to the Third Reich. That’s not a principled stand. That’s political cover, and it’s getting people hurt.
Sources: Mediaite, BizPac Review, Washington Examiner, KTAR News, The Hill