Dana Bash asked Tom Homan on Sunday whether ICE had made mistakes. He said he wouldn't call them that.
“So I wouldn't say — now that we're evaluating some additional training — that mistakes were made. We will see. It's all being reviewed.”
Bash's answer was the sentence of the week. “Well, we have seen with our own eyes mistakes were made, deadly mistakes were made.” At least five of them.
What is not in dispute
Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine. Federal officials confirmed he was not the intended target of the operation. His father told the New York Times he was in the country legally and authorized to work. He had a Social Security number.
In Houston, ICE officers stopped a van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, just before 7 a.m.
Court documents cited by Bash show that one of the officers connected to the Maine shooting had been accused of abuse by two ex-wives. One told CNN's Erin Burnett she experienced severe domestic violence, that he always displayed violent behavior, and that if anything ever happened to her, he'd be the one to look at. A judge ordered him to surrender his firearms.
Asked whether that man should be an active ICE employee, Homan didn't hedge: “No, if those are facts, I don't think he should have ever cleared vetting.”
That answer was correct and it was creditable. It also convicts the system he was there to defend.
The word “mistake” is doing all the work
I understand why he won't say it. Investigations are open. Officers have due process rights. A senior official conceding fault on television before an internal affairs review closes is a gift to a plaintiff's lawyer, and every agency counsel in Washington knows it.
That's a real institutional reason. It isn't a public one.
There is a version of what Homan could have said that costs nothing legally: A man who wasn't the target of our operation is dead. Whatever the review finds about the officer, that outcome is a failure, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Nothing in that concedes liability. It concedes reality.
The body camera is the right answer to a different question
Pressed on what changed, Homan pointed to body cameras — at least one on every vehicle stop, directed by acting ICE leadership.
He's right that they help. He's right that they exonerate officers more often than they convict them. I'd support the requirement without reservation.
But a camera records what happens. It does not change who is standing there holding the weapon.
If a man with a documented domestic violence history and a court order to surrender his firearms cleared vetting, the failure happened at a desk months before anyone got in a car. A camera would have produced better footage of the same outcome.
The part that should worry everyone
The stops were paused after two fatal shootings. The President reversed the pause in about a day.
Homan also said he didn't know the duty status of the officers involved — that policy would be administrative leave, but he hadn't tracked it.
That's the tell. Not the defensiveness. The not-knowing.
Add your perspective
Right: officers are entitled to a completed investigation before anyone calls their conduct a mistake, and vehicle stops are core enforcement. Left: five deaths and a vetting failure warrant suspension of the practice, not a camera policy. Center if you think the body-camera rule is genuinely good and completely beside the point.
