White House “border czar” Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem played good cop, bad cop at a right-wing conference on Saturday. Both continued to push President Donald Trump administration’s agenda to ramp up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and raids as it attacks undocumented migrants across the U.S.
While Noem began her speech with prayer, Homan struck a threatening tone toward protesters. There were several dozen protesters gathered outside the event, according to photos from Fox News. “You know what? I’m sick of the assholes. You want some? Come get some,” he said, adding that a heckler in the audience “ain’t got the balls to be an ICE officer.”
As top immigration officials in Trump’s administration, Noem and Homan are the TV spokespeople for the president’s sweeping, militarized immigration crackdown and his campaign of arbitrary arrests by masked, undercover agents. These operations are likely to expand to more blue cities now that Congress just gave ICE tens of billions of dollars to hire 10,000 more agents. Homan said Friday on Fox News that ICE does not need probable cause and can detain people based on “physical appearance.”
Noem and Homan spoke at the weekend-long Student Action Summit held in Tampa Bay by Turning Point USA — the far-right, Christian nationalist group founded by Charlie Kirk, who is slated to close out the summit on Sunday afternoon. The event also featured Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; political commentator and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson; Riley Gaines, a former swimmer and transphobe who’s mad about tying for 5th place with a trans woman at a swim meet; and actor Russell Brand, who became a right-wing Christian following sexual misconduct allegations. He delivered an energetic, chaotic speech about how he no longer speaks with his “groin.”
“My whole career speaking from my midriff,” he said, before Homan came on.
Homan had glowing reviews of the Trump administration. “Unlike the last administration,” Homan said, “President Trump’s policies are saving lives every day, and I wake up like a kid in a candy shop every day I’m working with this guy. And every day is an adventure, because I knew he’s going to let us do what we do to not only secure the border but remove millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden let in this country.”
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Toward the beginning of Homan’s speech, he was interrupted by a heckler, who asked if Homan was a member of MS-13. The audience booed and then Homan led them in a chant of “USA! USA!”
“This guy wouldn’t know what it’s like to serve his nation,” he said. “This guy ain’t got the balls to be an ICE officer. He hasn’t got the balls to be a border patrol agent. This guy lives in his mother’s basement. The only thing that surprised me, you don’t have purple hair and a nose ring. Get out of here, you loser. And if you’re such a badass, meet me off stage in 13 minutes and 50 seconds.”
“I guarantee you he sits down to pee,” Homan added.
Trump’s border czar came back to the topic of protesters several times in his speech. “If these protesters, these people with purple hair with a nose ring who live in their parents’ basement, who don’t work and want to go protest us, or getting paid by people if they think they’re going to stop ICE or stop Border Patrol from doing their job, they got another thing coming, because every time they double down, we’re going to triple down.”
The Trump administration is leading an unprecedented mass deportation campaign targeting immigrants, and the president sent in National Guard troops and Marines into Los Angeles following protests against ICE’s arrests at worksites and courthouses.
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Noem, who leads the Department of Homeland Security and thus oversees ICE and mass arrests and deportation of migrants, offered a religious speech, at a time when Christian leaders are increasingly condemning Trump and Republicans’ immigration policies. She began by offering a prayer for law enforcement officers.
“Grateful we come before you, extremely thankful for the blessings that you have given us, Lord, recognizing that we are a privileged people living in the greatest experiment on Earth, Lord,” she said. “You have given us a country that defends our freedoms and our liberties.”
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Noem, who, again, is indiscriminately deporting and incarcerating people, said everyone is “worth something in God’s eyes,” as part of a longer message about George Washington.
“George Washington put his faith first, and then he called people to fight,” she said. “He called them to go out there and to act as Christians, to go out there and to defend our rights and our freedoms. But when you go forward and do that with morals and with values, and understand that every person out there is worth something in God’s eyes, but yet we can disagree with them and still protect our freedoms and liberties. That’s invaluable. And the general that gave us this country and became our first president understood it better than anybody else.”
