‘Get out of here, you loser’: Border czar Tom Homan lays into heckler and later admits US citizens are swept up in raids

President Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, is increasingly becoming the face of the White House’s mass deportation effort as the onetime acting ICE chief shifts into a more overtly political role.

That politicization was on full display on Saturday night when Homan made a speech at at Turning Point USA conference, a Trump-aligned conservative youth group run by Charlie Kirk, a close ally of the president’s son Don Jr.

Homan’s characteristic gruff persona was on full display as a heckler confronted him shortly after he began speaking.

“You want some? Come get some,” Homan told the guy. “I’m tired of it. ... Tom Homan isn’t going anywhere. Tom Homan isn’t shutting up.

"This guy wouldn't know what it's like to serve this nation. This guy ain't got the balls to be an ICE officer. He hasn't got the balls to be a border patrol agent," Homan continued, as the crowd cheered him on.

As the heckler was being escorted out, Homan cracked, "This guy lives in his mother's basement. The only thing that surprised me is ... doesn't have purple hair and a nose ring.

“Get out of here, you loser."

Hours later, Homan was an embattled administration’s first line of defense on the Sunday interview circuit, where he engaged in damage control in an effort to walk back a seemingly obvious yet startling admission: that ICE agents and other immigration enforcement personnel were racially profiling people as they carried out large-scale raids across the country.

Homan had previously told Fox News on Friday that ICE agents “don't need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them ... based on their physical appearance”.

Without explanation of what he meant by “physical appearance”, it all but confirmed that Homan was directing agents to “briefly detain” (or more) people who they thought to be of Hispanic or Latino descent. The description matched a textbook case of racial profiling.

Speaking on Sunday with CNN’s Dana Bash on State of the Union, Homan did an about-face.

“Let me be clear, physical description can't be the sole factor to give you reasonable suspicion,” he told CNN.

”Physical description cannot be the sole reason to detain and question somebody. That can't be the sole reason to raise reasonable suspicion. It's a myriad of factors.”

He also stressed that “every ICE officer goes through Fourth amendment training every six months”, referring to training meant to guide federal law enforcement officers when it comes to making decisions about whether a “stop” is legal. But Homan also admitted that ICE had made what he called “collateral arrests” of American citizens in “many” instances.

Homan’s verbal slip-up comes as the White House official — whose formal title, “czar”, dates back to an informal term utilized by presidents dating back to FDR — has emerged as Trump’s clear favorite to defend his mass deportation program on media circuits.

That honor puts Homan, at least temporarily, in a spot once occupied by White House adviser Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, who as the head of the Department of Homeland Security has found herself confronted with questions about the administration’s plans to gut FEMA, the nation’s disaster relief agency.

It also comes at a convenient time for the president, who is watching a major fall-out between top members of his Justice Department team over the political implications of the continued secrecy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and the powerful figures to whom the pedophile billionaire financier was connected before his death in 2019.

For the “czar”, that means defending the most controversial aspects of the president’s policies. It’s an apparently easy ask for Homan, who championed the use of family separations as a deterrent for illegal border crossings even during the Obama administration, when he was ICE’s executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations.

In an interview that published Thursday with Politico, Homan was playing defense on a new aspect of the policy: raids on farms, which (especially out west) is a sector of the U.S. economy that relies heavily on seasonal workers, many of whom are undocumented.

Homan told Politico that the administration would not provide “amnesty” for undocumented farmworkers caught in ICE raids on farmworking communities.

“No one hires an illegal alien out of the goodness of their heart,” Homan told the news outlet. “They hire them because they can work them harder, pay them less, and undercut their competition with U.S. citizen employees.

He insisted: “Many, many illegal aliens do not pay taxes. They’re paid under the table. The employers don’t pay employee taxes, they don’t pay unemployment insurance. So they’re cheating the system.”

Despite Homan’s assertion, undocumented immigrants make up a significant portion of the American federal and state tax bases.

According to the Institute for Economic and Tax Policy, in 40 states undocumented immigrants make up a larger share of the tax base than the wealthiest 1 percent of households.