Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan admitted he wanted to thrash a member of Congress during a heated committee hearing.
Homan appeared on Fox News on Monday to discuss an exchange between himself and Rep. Jesus Garcia, D–Ill., during a Friday committee hearing on immigration officials’ handling of illegal migrant children on the U.S. southern border.
“If you noticed, I hesitated a minute before I started yelling because I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room, because when you tell somebody who has spent their career saving lives that I don’t care about dying children and I’m a racist, that’s when I broke and that’s where I had enough,” Homan said.
During the hearing, Garcia rapid-fired questions at Homan, who served as acting ICE director in the Trump administration before retiring last year, without giving him much of a chance to respond.
Garcia criticized family separation on the southern border and called for decriminalizing illegal migration before bombarding Homan with questions on his tenure as Trump’s border chief:
“Mr. Homan, do you understand that the consequences of separation of many children will be life-long trauma and carried across generations? Have we not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans? Mr. Homan, I’m a father. Do you have children? How can you possibly allow this to happen under your watch? Do you not care? Is it because these children don’t look like children that are around you? I don’t get it. Have you ever held a deceased child in your arms?”
During a break in the questioning, Homan called Garcia’s line of questioning “disgusting.” Homan testified that he had held a dead 5-year-old boy who had suffocated in the back of a tractor-trailer while attempting to cross the border.
“What I’ve been trying to do my 34 years serving my nation is to save lives, so for you to sit there and insult my integrity and my love for my country and for children — that’s why this whole thing needs to be fixed,” Homan said. “You’re a member of Congress. Fix it!”
