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U.S. Congressman Slams Border Czar Tom Homan: “Your Lawyers Admitted You’re Abusing Detainees”

by in Daily Edition | August 14, 2025 4 min read

Tom Homan

Tom Homan, Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Migrants being held inside ICE holding cells in New York City have complained of overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. One of the detainees, Sergio Alberto Barco Mercado, who was arrested by ICE and held at 26 Federal Plaza, is suing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Tricia McLaughlin, spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said on Wednesday that the lawsuit is “driven by complete fiction” and claimed that the conditions at ICE detention centers were “in most cases better than facilities which detain Americans.”

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan echoed McLaughlin’s opinion outside the White House where he spoke to the press (below). Homan said: “You guys ought to go and look at an ICE facility. Go look at it. I’ll compare. And if it’s an ICE facility that ICE owns, I’ll compare our detention standards to any county jail or state prison in the country.”

Homan added: “When I was the ICE director, we had county sheriffs and our contracts with them because they could not afford those types of standards. And they said if I can’t give these detention standards to a U.S. citizen why am I going to pay all this money to give detention standards to somebody who is not even supposed to be here.”

On Wednesday, U.S. Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) was denied entry to the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn for a second time, one week after he and two congressional colleagues also from New York, Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez, were turned away and told they could take a tour of the facility but only with advance notice. Having giving advance notice this week, Goldman says he was again denied entrance.

Goldman responded to Homan on social media: “Mr. @RealTomHoman, all I have been trying to do is ‘come visit’ your facility. You. Will. Not. Let. Me. Now that your lawyers have admitted in court that you’re abusing your detainees, please explain why you continue to lie to the American people.”

Below is an excerpt of the initial court proceeding, in which Jeffrey S. Oestericher of the U.S. Attorney’s office tells Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that the detainees in the ICE holding cells are receiving two meals a day instead of three, are sleeping on mats (“there are no beds in these holding rooms”), and that “in-person legal visitation, just based on the layout, is not feasible.”

Judge Kaplan contended that “probably the hardest problem is access to lawyers,” and noted that he may require the dedication of a certain number of telephone lines for the purpose of legal calls.

Oestericher opposed the idea saying that “individuals in detention are provided a call upon arrival, and their stay is short. And they are able to make calls upon request thereafter. And given the short-term nature, because it’s a holding and not a detention facility, that that suffices, and it is not a constitutional violation.”