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Critics Decry Trump Administration's Force-Feeding Torture of ICE Detainees
"If they admit openly that there are hunger strikes, they admit that the conditions in detention are so bad that people are willing to forgo food in order to raise awareness," one lawyer said of the administration.
Aug 03, 2026
The Trump administration subjected hunger-striking immigrants held in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers to involuntary medical procedures, including forced feeding, a blatant and painful violation of medical ethics widely considered to be torture.
In the second article of a two-piece series, The Guardian revealed on Monday that court records showed ICE personnel attempted to subject at least 10 hunger-striking detainees to the procedures. At least three, and possibly five, detainees were force-fed, while five others ended their hunger strikes at the last minute rather than undergo the invasive, non-consensual insertion of a plastic tube through the nose, down the throat and esophagus, and into the stomach to deliver liquid nutrition against their will.
Hundreds of people have gone on hunger strike at ICE detention centers across the country to protest overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, spoiled and worm-infested food and water, inadequate medical care, delays in immigration procedures, alleged physical and psychological torture, and other mistreatment.
The Guardian's investigation found that one Kurdish asylum seeker detained at ICE's Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Los Fresnos, Texas was subjected to force-feeding for eight months, while another hunger-striker at the same facility endured six months of the painful procedure. In six cases reviewed by The Guardian, immigrants who were force-fed had no legal representation.
The Department of Homeland Security maintains that detainees receive adequate meals and care and disputes reports of abuse.
In May, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed the hunger strikers as a "handful" of detainees and falsely claimed they were striking because they "want their ethnic right food."
"Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want... This isn't Holiday Inn," he added while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick looked on and smiled approvingly.
DHS Secretary Mullin dismisses the detainee hunger strike in an ICE facility:
They're refusing to eat because they want their ethnic food. Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want. This isn't Holiday Inn. pic.twitter.com/tdUYMkUy1K
— FactPost (@factpostnews) May 27, 2026
A judge must authorize the forced feeding of ICE detainees. According to The Guardian, judges often quickly issue the requested emergency orders before immigrants can legally object.
“There’s very little due process in these proceedings,” immigrant rights attorney Eunice Cho told the newspaper, comparing the judges' orders to a "rubber stamp."
Global medical authorities, United Nations bodies, human rights defenders, and others—including people subjected to it—call forced feeding a form of torture.
"The tube went inside a little bit and then got stuck," Ajay Kumar, a former ICE detainee force-fed during Trump's first term in 2019, told The Intercept, which in 2022 obtained video of the Indian asylum seeker being strapped and pinned down by five guards in riot gear before having the nasogastric tube forced into him.
"I felt as if [the tube] was going down my throat, tearing up the insides, and blood started coming from my mouth and nose," he said. "It was very hard."
"After that they took me for an X-ray. After doing the X-ray, they informed me that the tube has not been inserted properly, so we will have to insert it again," Kumar recalled. He was asked if he wanted to end his hunger strike and, when he said no, the second insertion began. "It was more painful. These people are torturing me. The one ICE officer, I never forget him. He's smiling."
Kumar was taken for a second X-ray and was again informed that the tube was incorrectly inserted. He was again asked if he would continue his strike.
"You can torment me as much as you want, you won't be able to break my spirits," he told them. The tube was correctly inserted the third time and Kumar was pumped full of a nutritional shake. He said he could not breathe, sleep, or speak properly for weeks after.
Kumar said he was force-fed in front of three other detainees "so that they would all start eating after seeing what's happening to me."
"Whenever the doctors said, 'Yes, we are helping you, we cannot let you die like this,' I used to tell them, you are treating me worse than dying," he added.
Under the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Malta, doctors are advised to not force-feed prisoners who choose to hunger strike and understand the consequences of their actions.
“Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable,” the declaration states.
In 1981, UK authorities allowed 10 imprisoned Irish Republican Army members, including former Member of Parliament Bobby Sands, to starve themselves to death in Northern Ireland. Their deaths occurred after between 46 and 73 days of refusing food.
In contrast, force-feeding is institutional policy in US prisons, including the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp in Cuba, where detainees—most of whom were charged with no crime—were force-fed during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
Immigrants detained by the US have been force-fed since at least the Obama administration.
Sarah Houston, a managing attorney at ImmDef, told The Guardian that an ICE Health Service Corps document acknowledging the force-feeding of detainees and viewed by the newspaper is a "blatant admission" that the practice is being used by the Trump administration.
“But if they admit openly that there are hunger strikes, they admit that the conditions in detention are so bad that people are willing to forgo food in order to raise awareness about the situation,” Houston said. “Because no one goes on hunger strike unless they are really desperate.”
Matthew Wynia, a medical ethicist and director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado, said that “it is unethical to force treatment on someone who is saying, 'Don’t do this to me.'"
“People who are on hunger strike do not want to die, they are not suicidal," he continued. "They are using the only tool available to them to protest the circumstances of their confinement.”
“The idea of health professionals serving as agents of the state, rather than protectors of our patients, has a notorious history," Wynia added. "And for the medical profession, we really don’t want to go down that path again."
The Guardian series comes amid a broader pattern of abuse and neglect, sometimes deadly, of ICE detainees, many of whom are locked up in facilities run by private prison profiteers.
According to ICE’s public database, more than 50 people have died while detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency during President Donald Trump’s second term, including two people who were killed in a sniper attack on an ICE administrative and processing center in Dallas. At least 10 of the deaths were men who killed themselves, according to an Associated Press investigation published late last month.
Many of the deaths were preventable, say experts who point to systemic understaffing and DHS policy choices that weaken detainee care and employee oversight.
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Climate Crisis Is Not 'Some Faraway Threat’: Spokane Inferno Forces Mass Evacuations as Oil Profits Surge
"The fossil fuel industry may not have struck the match, but the climate crisis they drove has loaded our landscapes with tinder," said an environmental activist.
Aug 03, 2026
Over 60,000 people were ordered to evacuate the Spokane area over the weekend as it was devastated by what Democratic Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell called the “top fire” in a nation currently being scorched by climate-fueled blazes.
Illustrating how the climate crisis is already impacting lives and communities across the country and the globe, three raging fires reportedly consumed over 600 structures as of Sunday, including homes and businesses, and reduced entire streets to their foundations.
At a briefing on Sunday afternoon, officials said more than 250,000 acres were burning across Washington, but reported no deaths or injuries.
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown called it "the worst natural disaster our region has faced."
Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson has requested assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is under the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wrote on social media that she had spoken with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and that he “made clear the federal government will do everything it can to support response and recovery,” though President Donald Trump has previously intervened to block disaster aid to Democrat-led states.
While the fires moderated over the weekend, on Monday they remained largely uncontained and continued to spread due to dry conditions from recent severe droughts in the region, exacerbated by rising global temperatures.
"This is climate change playing out live in real time," said meteorologist and Climate Central journalist Shel Winkley in a video about the Spokane fires.
Warmer temperatures, he explained, have caused a vicious cycle of "weather whiplash" in which greater winter rainfall facilitates plant growth before harsher summer heat domes suck moisture from these plants, turning them into a tinderbox.
“Northeastern Washington and central Oregon now see at least three more weeks of fire weather days each year than they did just back in the 1970s,” Winkley said. “More fire weather days means more chances for a spark, any spark, to turn into this.”
The blazes are part of a nationwide trend, with wildfires this year more severe on average than in previous years. Over the past decade, the average annual acreage burned in the US was more than double the average of the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.
Last week, an Oxfam analysis of data published in the journal Nature found that emissions from just five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies—were sufficient to cause around 1 in 4 heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023—"heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change."
Using S&P Capital Trucost data, the group estimated that Big Oil was responsible for more than $60 billion in environmental damage last year.
But as costs fall on the public, oil companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil have reported record profits of $12.1 billion and $14.5 billion over the past quarter, in part due to global oil price spikes driven by Trump's war with Iran.
"The fossil fuel industry may not have struck the match, but the climate crisis they drove has loaded our landscapes with tinder," said Clémence Dubois, the campaigns director for the environmental group 350.org. "Chevron and Exxon are profiteering from a model of distraction, leaving ordinary people to pay the price with higher bills and devastating impacts such as these fires. These profits feel almost criminal.“
Jay Inslee, Washington's former Democratic governor and a longtime advocate for policies to combat the climate crisis, said on Sunday that his friend, a legislator from Spokane, had been forced to flee his home due to the fires.
“Climate change isn’t some faraway threat,” Inslee said. “It’s happening right now, to our neighbors and friends. We have to fight for them."
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Top DHS Statistics Official Resigns, Citing 'War on Immigrants' and Trump's 'Brazen Corruption'
"Since Trump took office last year, his office has been repeatedly blocked from sharing previously public data," said one expert of Marc Rosenblum.
Jul 28, 2026
A top immigration policy expert accused a right-wing online news source of spreading an "outrageous lie" on Monday about the US Department of Homeland Security's top statistician, who resigned over the weekend and cited President Donald Trump's "war on immigrants" as a major reason for his departure.
America First Post wrote in a post on social media that Marc Rosenblum, who until recently was the executive director of the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), "easily could’ve been underreporting deportations or illegal populations, ruining data."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, countered that Rosenblum sought under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration to publish "the most transparent data on immigration enforcement ever; monthly information on [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection] arrests and removals, stuff that had NEVER been published before."
Such data has not been published since the first days of Trump's second term in the White House, said Reichlin-Melnick, as the president has ramped up deportation operations and federal agents have violently carried out his anti-immigration agenda—arresting more than 10,000 people in a recent five-day span and killing at least 11 people during enforcement operations.
In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum wrote that over 10 years, the team he managed at OHSS grew from 11 people to 45 people under the Biden administration.
"We matured official data processing to update monthly," wrote Rosenblum. "We launched new lines of daily and weekly internal reports. We massively expanded our analytic capacity."
"My OHSS co-workers are outstanding career federal civil servants. They are smart, mission-focused experts who produce high-quality results in a challenging and often hostile work environment," he continued. "But it will come as no surprise that I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration. Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change."
Daniel Delgado, a former DHS deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy, said the department was "far better off for the work that Marc accomplished, no matter how hard the current incompetent leadership try to hide it."
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute—which has found that the majority of immigration arrests made last year were of people who had no criminal convictions—told NOTUS last November that under the Trump administration, DHS was providing "no accountability, no way to assess, no public understanding about what’s really going on that is not curated by a press release from the agency."
Reichlin-Melnick has also frequently spoken out about the lack of data being publicly released by DHS to back up its claims about immigration arrests.
While DHS has repeatedly claimed in public statements that its agents are getting "the worst of the worst off our streets," the agency's own "Worst of the Worst" database released late last year showed less than 10,000 people who had been arrested—a tiny fraction of the 220,000 people who had been detained by federal agents up to that point.
"Marc Rosenblum was one of the most dedicated civil servants I’ve ever met, a man who spent his career working to get DHS to share more data," said Reichlin-Melnick. "Since Trump took office last year, his office has been repeatedly blocked from sharing previously public data."
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Video of Woman Boxed In by Unmarked Cars Calls Into Question Homan's Demand to 'Comply' With ICE or Die
"'Just comply' means women are being told to surrender to potential kidnappers, and hope they turn out to be government agents."
Jul 22, 2026
As US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deals with the fallout of two fatal shootings, President Donald Trump's border czar Tom Homan has said the deaths were the fault of victims who did not "comply" with agents.
"It comes down to one simple fact. These people failed to comply with law enforcement," Homan said on Monday outside the White House. "All they had to do was simply comply. If they did, they'd be alive today."
Questions remain about the extent to which the two men killed earlier this month—Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Guerrero in Maine—defied ICE agents leading up to their arrests, and the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) initial narrative that the two men attempted to attack agents with their vehicles has been undercut by video and eyewitness evidence.
Meanwhile, legal experts have noted that failure to comply with law enforcement on its own is not a justification for deadly force under DHS guidelines or the guidelines of any other law enforcement agency, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that lethal force must be reserved for situations where suspects pose an immediate danger.
ICE critics have further pointed out that the agency’s unprecedented tactics under the second Trump administration—the use of unmarked cars, the refusal to self-identify, and the use of excessive force without clear justifications—make compliance impossible in many cases.
A prominent social media user known as Jesus Freakin' Congress, who catalogs ICE abuses on her account for more than 50,000 followers, drew attention to a case out of Schaumburg, Illinois, as "an example of what [Homan] wants you to comply with."
The video, filmed by Instagram user Mari Elena months earlier and posted this week, shows what she believed to be agents in unmarked vehicles following her as she attempted to leave a parking lot before a gray SUV suddenly cut her off as she approached an intersection.
"I saw what appeared to be ICE agents in a parking lot and began recording them from a distance," she explained in the post. "After they noticed I was recording, several of their vehicles drove past me. Because I was alone, I decided to leave the parking lot. As I was leaving, four ICE vehicles surrounded my vehicle in the middle of the road."
Video shows the gray SUV sitting motionless in front of Mari as she honked repeatedly. She had nowhere to go without hitting either the curb or the vehicle in front of her. After blocking her for over a minute, the vehicle drove through the intersection, allowing Mari to leave.
At no point did any of the vehicles activate their emergency lights to indicate that they were law enforcement or that she was being detained.
Jesus Freakin' Congress noted the difficulty this posed for Mari, who "wasn’t even 100% sure" that the men boxing in her car were ICE agents.
Imagine being a woman, alone in your car. A group of cars you cannot clearly identify as law enforcement, start following you. They don’t turn on emergency lights. They don’t clearly identify themselves. And one of them cuts you off and [is] blocking your vehicle from being able to drive away.
What are you supposed to think is happening? Because from your perspective, it looks like you are being kidnapped by random people.
And that is the terrifying part of what ICE is doing. They are creating situations where people have no idea whether the people surrounding them are legitimate law enforcement officers, or strangers attempting to abduct, or rob them. And Tom Homan’s answer to being kidnapped, or robbed, is… “Just comply.”
Don’t try to drive away. Don’t defend yourself. Don’t try to escape. Just calmly allow unidentified people, in unmarked vehicles, to follow you, box you in, and potentially kidnap or rob you… Because if they happen to be ICE agents, and you react like a normal person who believes they are being kidnapped, you could be assaulted, detained, or even shot. Do you understand how dangerous and insane that is?!?
“Just comply” means women are being told to surrender to potential kidnappers, and hope they turn out to be government agents. And if they don’t? Tom Homan says it’s their fault for not complying.
Although Mari was not able to confirm that the vehicles boxing her in were driven by ICE agents, her case represents the type of scenario in which Homan demands people to simply "comply."
Since it became commonplace for faceless agents to prowl the streets, there have been numerous documented cases of people impersonating immigration agents in order to kidnap, rob, and sexually assault victims.
The FBI itself put out a bulletin last year urging agents to identify themselves to prevent confusion. However, there is no evidence that DHS has implemented those guidelines.
According to a report from Wired on Wednesday, the Trump administration has sued at least five states, as well as the city of Philadelphia, in order to block laws that would stop agents from wearing masks during operations.
Witnesses say that in the incident that led to Salgado's shooting, agents did not identify themselves as law enforcement before the encounter escalated. ICE has not produced evidence that agents identified themselves before shooting Guerrero in Maine. In both cases, the men killed were not the targets of ICE's operations.
In the wake of Homan's demands that those approached by immigration agents "comply", legal experts have warned that ICE's tactics are creating fear that compels people to do the exact opposite.
"ICE and other federal immigration agents have made quick compliance difficult or impossible," Hiroshi Motomura, professor of immigration and citizenship law at the UCLA School of Law, told HuffPost. "Many agents aren't identifying themselves in any trustworthy way."
"It's only natural for people to not comply as quickly as officers might like," he continued. "In these moments of apprehension and fear, some officers seem to be escalating into violence."
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Viral Video Shows Moment Man Goes From 'That's What Happens' to 'That's Fucking Sad' About ICE Killing
"If you only watched the first 10 seconds you might conclude this guy was a MAGA thug who could not be persuaded of anything. But he listened and he thought and he went, 'Hmm, okay I'm not so sure anymore.'"
Jul 17, 2026
Two days after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, a local videographer was filming an interview with a neighbor about the latest shooting by the agency when another resident was heard off camera uttering a familiar refrain among those who support President Donald Trump's mass deportation policy.
"There's a right way to get in the country and a wrong way to get in the country," the man was heard saying as the interviewee, who had been calling for politicians to speak out about the killing, paused her comments and appeared to brace herself for an unpleasant confrontation.
The videographer, Kalle Bailey, pointed the camera at the passerby and asked if he wanted to make any comments on camera.
The man repeated his remark, adding, "Anyone that skips the line, it's just like if me and you were waiting in a steakhouse and some jerk just skipped the whole line and said, 'Screw you, screw you, screw you, and screw you.'"
"For the people that are doing it the wrong way, well, unfortunately, that's what happens," he said.
The man was speaking about the killing—the exact details of which are still murky—of 25-year-old Guerrero early Monday morning shortly after he left the house he shared with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter.
The videographer politely but firmly debunked the man's comments, asking him whether he knew that Guerrero, who had come to the US from Colombia, had a permit to work in the US oand had been issued a Social Security number by the Trump administration, according to a lawyer for Guerrero's family.
"He wasn't even the target of the investigation," added Bailey.
The man indicated that he had previously heard Guerrero was armed, which Bailey and his interviewee also let him know wasn't true.
"They shot him because they claimed they were trying to protect the public at large, not even an officer's safety," Bailey said. When the man responded that he "didn't know the whole scope" of the incident, Bailey noted that "a lot of people don't" and expressed appreciation that the man was open to hearing about the details that are known of Guerrero's killing.
"That's fucking sad, then," said the man. "So he did it the right way, and still, and still that's what happens."
Videos have emerged showing the moments following the shooting, but not when at least one officer fired their weapon five times, or the events leading up to the killing.
Bullet holes were seen in Guerrero's windshield, and in one surveillance video obtained by The New York Times, voices were heard saying, “Move it, let’s go,” and “Back, back" just before five shots rang out.
Guerrero's vehicle was also seen in surveillance footage taken from a nearby store, circling slowly in an intersection as officers surrounded the car.
The agents then opened the car door and pulled Guerrero out before he fell to the ground.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, has acknowledged that Guerrero was not the target of the surveillance they were conducting. The agency was investigating another resident for whom it reportedly had a deportation order.
ICE has also said Guerrero was fleeing the scene, and that an officer fired his weapon to protect public safety.
A person's attempt to flee a scene—regardless of their immigration status, how they entered the country, or whether ICE has a deportation order for them—is not sufficient grounds for law enforcement officers to use force under Department of Justice policy, and ICE officers are instructed not to shoot into a moving vehicle—though they have in a number of shootings in the past year.
Despite the fact that Guerrero was not even the target of ICE's operations Monday morning, the Trump administration has responded to widespread condemnation of the killing by calling the victim an “illegal alien" and saying the work authorization and Social Security number he had been issued did not mean he was authorized to be in the country.
As DHS continues to suggest Guerrero was a legitimate target of ICE's mass deportation operations, journalist Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs gave the man in the viral video credit for his openness to learning more about the man he had assumed was a criminal.
The video, said Robinson, "shows why it's important to not write people off. If you only watched the first 10 seconds you might conclude this guy was a MAGA thug who could not be persuaded of anything. But he listened and he thought and he went, 'Hmm, okay I'm not so sure anymore.'"
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Amid ICE Killings and Surge in Arrests, Mullin Brags DHS 'Turning Up the Heat on the Streets'
ICE is already on track to arrest more people this month than any other month during the second Trump administration.
Jul 17, 2026
As scrutiny builds over two fatal shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in less than a week, US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the Trump administration was only going to keep ramping up its aggressive mass deportation push. Arrests have already reached a record high this month.
Mullin brushed off questions from reporters on Friday about the shootings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine—neither of whom was the target of ICE's operations—which have generated calls for investigations and reforms to ICE's tactics, including the traffic stops that led to the fatal shootings.
Earlier this week, acting assistant secretary Lauren Bis called on critical politicians and media outlets to "turn down the temperature" of their rhetoric towards ICE, which she claimed is “fueling vehicle attacks" against agents. The administration has claimed that both men attempted to "weaponize" their vehicles, but video and eyewitness accounts have not backed this up.
In light of the agency's calls to "turn down the temperature," a reporter asked Mullin whether he could assure Americans that ICE officers who violate the agency's use-of-force policy would face consequences and whether he'd commit to making that determination publicly.
"Let me clarify. When I say 'turn down the temperature,' I mean turn down the temperature with you guys," Mullin said, pointing at members of the media. "We're turning up the heat on the streets."
"We're out there working harder than we ever have because we've empowered law enforcement to do their jobs," he said. "What I'm trying to do is remove us from the headlines every single day."
Mullin added that "everybody will be held accountable," and that he would enforce the law "with our own agency" and "with the criminals on the streets."
Facing pressure from senior White House adviser Stephen Miller to reach a quota of 3,000 arrests per day, ICE has overwhelmingly prioritized going after individuals without criminal convictions during President Donald Trump's second term, despite the administration's claims that it's targeting "the worst of the worst."
A leaked Department of Homeland Security report published in February showed that just 14% of the nearly 400,000 people taken into custody by ICE in 2025 had been charged with or convicted of violent criminal offenses, while 40% have never been charged with any crime.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that ICE is on track to arrest more people in July than any previous month of the second Trump administration. Arrests dropped for a short time in February after immigration agents shot two US citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—in Minneapolis, but spiked to a new high of over 39,500 in June.
None of the agents involved in January's pair of fatal shootings have faced federal charges, and the Trump administration has actively sought to obstruct state-level investigations into the shootings by withholding evidence, some of which was finally turned over on Monday.
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After Killings, Homan Says There Will Be ‘More Bloodshed’ Unless Dems ‘Shut Their Mouth’ About ICE
"They are blaming the opposition for people being killed by their police."
Jul 16, 2026
As Democrats demand investigations and accountability after a pair of fatal shootings by immigration agents, the White House border czar, Tom Homan, issued an ominous warning on Wednesday: Shut your mouth or the "bloodshed" will continue.
Since July 7, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have shot and killed two men—Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Guerrero in Maine.
The killings, which are part of a broader rash of violent behavior by immigration agencies, briefly led DHS to suspend the use of traffic stops by agents, before President Donald Trump ordered them to continue.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers have promised to launch investigations and congressional hearings. Some have threatened to withhold funding for the agency unless reforms, like body camera requirements, are enacted, while others have called for the agency to be defunded or abolished.
Homan, a senior adviser to Trump tasked with coordinating immigration enforcement across agencies, took to Fox News on Wednesday night to address this heightened scrutiny.
Just one day before, Homan had defended the decision to temporarily halt vehicle stops, saying there should be a "short-term review to make sure ICE agents are safe and doing the right thing.”
But following Trump's orders, he reversed course entirely the next day and rejected the idea that anything about the agency's tactics needed reevaluation.
He told host Laura Ingraham, "President Trump was clear, this policy is not going away."
Instead of trigger-happy agents, he said that anti-ICE "rhetoric" from Democrats was to blame for the recent killings.
"It all goes back to the Dems who want to continually attack ICE and tell people to evade them and tell people don't comply, tell people to resist, and tell people ICE isn't a real law enforcement agency," Homan said.
"You and I talked about this a year-and-a-half ago, Laura," he continued. "I said, if the hateful rhetoric didn't stop, there would be bloodshed."
"I'm saying it right now," Homan said. "There's still going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted."
DHS has acknowledged that neither of the men who have been shot in recent weeks was the target of the ICE operations that led to their deaths.
A witness reported that Guerrero shouted, "I tried to stop" after being shot by an agent while his vehicle moved forward slowly.
ICE's use-of-force rules state that agents should only use deadly force if they believe an individual poses an imminent threat to an agent or someone else, not simply because they are fleeing arrest.
DHS claimed that Salgado attempted to "weaponize" his vehicle, but that claim has been undercut by video evidence and eyewitness accounts.
The agency said in a statement that Guerrero "attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon," a justification that has not been used for previous shootings.
Many Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), have provided information about individuals' rights when dealing with immigration agents—including the right not to answer the door without a judicial warrant, the right to decline a search or to sign documents, or the right to record law enforcement.
But Homan did not reference any particular case in which they encouraged those facing detention to "resist" by fleeing or attacking agents.
Several Democratic members of Congress, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (Calif.), Jason Crow (Colo.), and Ilhan Omar (Minn.), among others, have published "Know Your Rights" documents explicitly warning people not to run away or resist arrest.
Agents have frequently faced criticism that they are not, in fact, "enforcing the law" as Homan claimed, but defying it by conducting indiscriminate arrests without warrants, using excessive violence, detaining legal residents and US citizens, and engaging in racial profiling.
Homan's remarks were widely seen as a deflection of blame from immigration agents and as a way to intimidate critics into silence.
"They are blaming the opposition for people being killed by their police," said Alex Nowrasteh, the senior vice president of policy at the libertarian Cato Institute.
USA Today columnist Chris Brennan said Homan was "threaten[ing] more governmental violence… unless Americans stop engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment."
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) called it "extremely irresponsible and dangerous language from the Trump administration's top immigration official."
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'I Told Him That I Was Not Going to Lie for Him': Ex-Wife IDs ICE Agent Who Killed Man in Maine
"Then he tried to say that it was a justified shooting because the guy tried to hit him with his car," said the former wife of David Michael Brouillette.
Jul 16, 2026
David Michael Brouillette's ex-wife said he is the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, according to Thursday reporting by The Portland Press Herald.
"He was asking me to lie for him and to cover for his character," Ashley Brouillette told the newspaper. "I told him that I was not going to lie for him. And then he tried to say that it was a justified shooting because the guy tried to hit him with his car."
According to the Press Herald, which reviewed a screenshot of incoming calls to Ashley Brouillette, she said that she'd seen video footage of the shooting and told her ex-husband that "nowhere in there does it show that this man charged at you with a car."
Common Dreams has not independently verified Ashley Brouillette's claims—which also included that he was abusive during their relationship; she previously reported concerns about the US Army veteran's mental health to his superiors in the military; and she and her family have received threats since reports of her ex’s involvement in the shooting began to spread online.
The US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has refused to name any involved agents, and David Brouillette—a Manchester-based 37-year-old who is also a licensed real estate agent and has held various law enforcement and public safety jobs in the state—did not respond to the Press Herald's multiple requests for comment.
However, "a witness to the Biddeford shooting, Daniel Boucher, told the Press Herald he saw an agent on scene who matched Brouillette's description," the newspaper noted. "Three people who worked with Brouillette at the Manchester Fire Department also confirmed that Brouillette was pictured in images they saw from video of the scene in Biddeford after the shooting."
David Brouillette was previously identified as the shooter by TheICEList.org, a website founded by Netherlands-based immigration activist Dominick Skinner that serves as "a public, verifiable record of US immigration enforcement—incidents, agents, deaths, vehicles, and facilities—documented with sources and open to everyone."
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'There Must Be Independent Investigations,' House Democrats Argue After ICE Killings in Maine and Texas
"Trump's DHS has lost the trust of the American people and can no longer be considered a reliable source of fact."
Jul 15, 2026
Nearly all Democrats in the US House of Representatives on Wednesday demanded independent investigations into federal immigration agents' recent fatal shootings of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas.
The men killed—immigrants from Colombia and Mexico—apparently weren't even the targets of the operations that claimed their lives earlier this month, Democrats stressed in their letter to the leaders at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
"Both of these incidents have created enormous fear and outrage in the community, and raise serious questions about the safety of community members, regardless of immigration status," the nearly 200 members of Congress wrote to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and ICE acting Director David Venturella.
The letter was led by Democrats from both states, Congresswomen Chellie Pingree (Maine) and Sylvia Garcia (Texas), as well as ranking members on key House panels: Reps. Bennie Thompson (Miss.) of the Committee on Homeland Security, Jamie Raskin (Md.) of the Judiciary Committee, and Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) of the Subcommittee on Immigration, Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.
"DHS agents have shot at least 22 people just since the start of President Donald Trump's second term. Six of these shootings have been fatal, resulting in the death of US citizens and individuals with no criminal records," wrote the lawmakers—who have also drawn attention to the dozens of immigrants who have died at ICE detention centers under this administration.
"In several of these cases, DHS and its component agencies made unsubstantiated allegations about individuals its agents have shot and even killed, including Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Ruben Ray Martinez, Marimar Martinez, and Julio Sosa-Celis," they highlighted. "DHS claimed that the shooting victims were attacking law enforcement officers, attempting to 'weaponize' their vehicles, and even called them domestic terrorists."
The Democrats emphasized that "in each case, evidence later emerged that contradicted these claims, showing that DHS representatives made false statements and DHS agents acted inappropriately, resulting in several cases against DHS's victims to be dismissed with prejudice. As such, Trump's DHS has lost the trust of the American people and can no longer be considered a reliable source of fact."
"We are calling for immediate independent investigations into both of these deaths, without interference. We are also calling on ICE to stop any removal proceedings against the witnesses to Mr. Salgado Araujo's killing for the duration of the investigation," they wrote, pointing to reported attempts by the administration to deport his brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, as well as two employees, Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego and Daniel Tirado Pantoja.
Those three witnesses to the killing in Texas "should have no threat of retaliation or deportation to provide their testimony," the lawmakers argued. "Similarly, DHS must not interfere with any investigations into the death of Mr. Guerrero. Far too many people, Americans and noncitizens alike, are dead as a result of DHS's reckless actions."
The House Democrats aren't alone in their demand. The Fair Immigration Reform Movement, faith leaders, and labor advocates held a Wednesday press conference to call for "independent investigations and real accountability" after the deaths in Texas and Maine, as well as Florida.
The 28-year-old man who officials say died Tuesday after being hit by a tractor-trailer while fleeing federal immigration agents at a gas station in St. Augustine has not yet been publicly identified, but like the other two cases, he had been in a vehicle. Despite the rising death toll, Trump said Wednesday that he wants ICE to keep pulling over cars.
"No one can be guaranteed safety from this rogue agency, which has terrorized our community since long before the current administration, but is now capturing and even widening a net of Americans in their ruthless execution of the mass deportation agenda," said Lizeth Chacon, executive director of Workers Defense Action Fund, one of the groups demanding an independent probe.
"To end this brutal campaign for good, we must abolish ICE and offer a pathway to citizenship for all," Chacon declared. "The officers responsible for the killing of Mr. Lorenzo must be held accountable. We can and must dismantle this agency because ICE's next victim could be any of us. Mr. Lorenzo could be any of us."
Rev. Jodi Hayashida, an organizer from Multifaith Justice Maine, said Wednesday that "the most important fact about ICE is that it is simply the latest vehicle in this nation's long-standing practice of racialized state-sanctioned violence and terror, that this paramilitary force accountable to nearly no one and funded by billions of dollars pulled from our housing and healthcare does not provide the safety or security it promises. It is a threat to the well-being of all people."
"We know that death is an inevitable consequence of the existence of ICE, modifications to practices and policies are not enough," Hayashida added. "In the very short term ICE must not be allowed to investigate itself. We demand a full, transparent accounting of every single death, and then we demand that Congress stop funding this violence and remove ICE from our communities altogether."
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Trump Admin Finally Hands Over Evidence on Good and Pretti Killings to Minnesota Prosecutors After Withholding It For 6 Months
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said it "should never have taken this long."
Jul 13, 2026
After being shut out of the investigations by the Trump administration, Minnesota prosecutors announced on Monday that federal investigators finally turned over reams of unseen evidence related to shootings by immigration agents that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti and injured Julio Sosa-Celis in January.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced that after "six months of relentless collective effort," state and local prosecutors had "obtained hard drives of previously withheld evidence" about the killings, which took place during the administration's aggressive surge of immigration agents in and around Minneapolis and sparked a wave of protests.
Moriarty added that prosecutors had also obtained some physical evidence that was "previously withheld" by federal investigators. This includes the SUV that Good, a 37-year-old US citizen and mother of three, had been driving when she was shot through her driver's side window by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross as she appeared to be leaving the scene of an enforcement operation.
Attorney Antonio Romanucci and the legal team representing the family of Good said in a statement that turning over the vehicle and other evidence was "an important and meaningful step towards justice and accountability," and that they were "grateful for the resumption of regular investigatory protocols, which is not only important for the families impacted in these cases, but it is essential for the community and the country."
Shortly after Good was shot, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin portrayed her as a “violent rioter" who had attempted to run over Ross with her car, which then-Secretary Kristi Noem claimed was an "act of domestic terrorism." But video evidence showed that her wheels were pointed away from the agent, indicating that she was attempting to leave.
Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller similarly described Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, another US citizen, as a "would-be assassin” while DHS said he showed up at a protest against ICE attempting to "massacre law enforcement" based on the fact that he was carrying a legal firearm when he was shot by two Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents.
Videos showed that Pretti had intervened to stop agents from harming another protester and only held his phone during the confrontation, never reaching for his gun.
Sosa-Celis, a 24-year-old Venezuelan national, was called a "violent criminal alien" by DHS, which accused him and his two roommates of having attacked agent Christian Castro with snow shovels, leading Sosa-Celis to be shot in the leg through the door of the home.
Assault charges against him and his roommate were dropped by federal prosecutors after video and medical evidence showed that Castro had not been attacked. ICE Director Todd Lyons acknowledged that the agents had lied about the incident, and Castro has since been arrested after being charged by Moriarty's office as part of an independent investigation.
Neither Ross nor the two CBP agents who shot Pretti—Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez—have been charged.
Federal authorities have repeatedly rejected demands from Minnesota officials to cooperate with investigations into the three shootings and grant access to evidence and the ability to interview witnesses.
In the case of Pretti, agents blocked investigators with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from entering the shooting scene after the BCA had obtained a search warrant and removed physical evidence before Minnesota investigators could document it. This included Pretti's gun, cellphone, and body camera footage, and other physical and digital evidence.
In March, Minnesota sued the Trump administration over its refusal to cooperate with the investigations, a lawsuit that was still ongoing as of Monday.
The federal government did not explain its sudden change of direction. The Associated Press described it as part of an agreement in which Minnesota agreed to share evidence it had collected in Castro's case if the federal government shared evidence it was withholding about the shootings of Good and Pretti.
Moriarty thanked the federal officials for "their willingness to consider changing course to share evidence and promote public trust."
But Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison emphasized that it "should never have taken this long."
"I remain deeply troubled that the federal government spent more than half a year attempting to conceal this evidence from state investigators," he said in a statement. "And I hope this is the beginning of a major course correction on the part of the federal government."
US Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) agreed that "this took way too long" and said, "It's not enough."
"Minnesotans' trust has been fundamentally broken," she said. "There's a long way to go before we get true justice for ICE killing two of our neighbors."
The federal government's decision to turn over evidence to Minnesota officials came less than a week after an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican father in Houston, whom DHS claimed had attempted to attack officers with his car, only to once again be undermined by video and witness accounts.
DHS has acknowledged that it was not attempting to target Salgado for removal and had mistaken his van for someone else's.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has said that, just like in Minnesota, the federal government was refusing to share evidence with local officials.
“The federal government has not invited us in,” Teare said. “The federal government is not collaborating with us with this investigation.”
On Monday, ICE agents killed another man in Maine, 26-year-old Colombian father Joan Sebastian Guerrero, who was reportedly shot several times after stopping his vehicle, according to video footage.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said Guerrero “weaponized” his vehicle and attempted to ram officers. One eyewitness told Reuters they saw a federal SUV ram Guerrero's car.
According to Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), Mullin said that Guerrero, who was authorized to work in the US and had a Social Security number, was not the target of the warrant agents were executing.
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