The most dangerous man in government – except Trump

ICE’s totalitarian rampages are lawless and abhorrent

Jul 15, 2025

In recent weeks, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has become the most dangerous enforcement body in the United States, and the immigration “czar,” Tom Homan, the most dangerous public official save only Donald Trump.

Hordes of ICE agents—masked and menacing—have been sweeping into communities, roughing up immigrants and citizens alike, ignoring constitutional limits, and creating indelible images of the sort we typically observe only in the worst totalitarian states.

Atop this rogue organization sits Homan, a perennial apologist for ICE’s legal abuses, who has been feeding the American public a steady diet of bad law and inflammatory rhetoric since 2017.

Homan has presided over ICE’s transformation from a regulatory agency into something more like a rogue militia. For years, he has defended the thuggish tactics of ICE agents with a smirk and a shrug. If you want to understand the culture of ICE today—its contempt for legal norms and its disdain for the rights of immigrants and citizens alike—start with Homan.

Consider the now-infamous July 2019 Nashville driveway standoff. ICE agents, acting on an administrative warrant, surrounded a van containing a father and his young son. No criminal charges were filed, no contraband was found, and the only “offense” appeared to be that the man looked Hispanic. Homan later defended agents’ tactics, insisting they didn’t need probable cause. “They just need totality of the circumstances,” he explained. “Based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions.”

That claim is dangerously ignorant—and a license for unconstitutional racial profiling.
And it’s part of a pattern. In 2017 and 2018, ICE launched home raids without judicial warrants, relying instead on flimsy administrative papers or outright coercion (agents often gained entry under false pretenses). Then came the prolonged detentions between 2018 and 2020, when ICE held non-citizens for months without bond hearings, violating basic due process principles.

Most recently, ICE descended on two cannabis farms in Ventura County, California, arresting roughly 200–300 people. At least four were U.S. citizens. One was George Retes, a disabled veteran who disappeared into ICE custody for several days; eyewitnesses say he was simply reversing his vehicle. ICE agents broke the window of his moving car, pepper-sprayed him, dragged him out, and kept him incognito for days.

Homan again took to the airwaves with the same canard about agents not needing probable cause:

“Look, people need to understand, ICE officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them. They just need totality of the circumstances… location, occupation, physical appearance, actions.”

Despite Homan’s swagger, he is bluffing. In the first place, while Homan talks tough, ICE agents serving administrative warrants, which is their typical practice, are not the legal equivalent of law enforcement officers serving judicial warrants. In essence, they possess no more arrest power than a Walmart security guard.

More important, in the absence of probable cause to believe they are confronting an illegal alien, their legal ability to stop anyone is strictly limited. They must have reasonable suspicion that the person is here illegally, and that must be based on specific, articulable facts that apply to the person in particular. And the stop must be brief and minimally intrusive. Even a weapons pat-down is forbidden in the absence of a reasonable belief that the person is armed and dangerous.

In recent months, ICE agents have routinely been violating every one of these constitutional constraints.

What ICE has been doing, and Homan defending, are stops (or outright arrests) based on traits that do not uniquely identify undocumented immigrants: language spoken, physical appearance, or presence in immigrant-dense areas. That is why U.S. citizens keep getting swept into these dragnets.

Worse still, Homan’s ICE doesn’t conduct mere Terry stops. They smash windows, drag people out violently, and make full-blown arrests—often of innocent individuals and with no probable cause.

Courts have noticed. After last week’s Ventura County raid, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued an emergency injunction forbidding ICE from using race, language, or occupation as triggers for enforcement:

“There is a mountain of evidence… that the federal government committed the violations alleged… The temporary injunction prohibits federal use of race, language, or occupation as the sole bases for immigration suspicion.”

Yet Homan didn’t blink. Asked about the ruling, he doubled down: “ICE officers don’t need probable cause… They just need totality of the circumstances—location, occupation, appearance.”

Homan’s loud, legally hollow rhetoric matches his swaggering persona. Over the weekend, when a heckler in “Ultra MAGA” gear shouted a question, Homan snarled:

“You’re such a bada**? Meet me offstage in 13 minutes and 50 seconds… guarantee you he sits down to pee. Guaranteed.”

What kind of federal law enforcement officer talks like a schoolyard meathead? What democratic society tolerates the brutal thuggery of these ICE raids?

Homan is an unrepentant bully—the purest form of law enforcement arrogance. He wears judicial rebukes like merit badges and uses every microphone he’s handed to justify ICE overreach. His contempt for constitutional limits would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous, and it permeates an agency increasingly untethered from the rule of law.

What ICE has become—under Homan’s influence—is perhaps the closest thing the United States has seen to a rogue enforcement agency. It operates by its own rules, with minimal oversight and a deeply ingrained hostility to constitutional constraints.

ICE must be reined in—not only for the sake of immigrants, but for the rule of law itself. When Tom Homan says officers can detain anyone based on “totality of the circumstances,” he isn’t just green-lighting racial profiling; he’s laying out a roadmap for dismantling constitutional protections for everyone, including American citizens.

This isn’t only about broken windows and broken bodies. It’s about a broken system—one that needs more than reform. It needs a reckoning, and a sane, law-abiding, Constitution-respecting leader at the top.

Guaranteed.

Talk to you later.