Ten deportees said they experienced or witnessed what they called abusive or violent treatment by ICE. They spent months in detention, they said, before being sent to nations where they had no ties.
Page A12From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
Homan denies ICE 'terrorizes little kids'; Liberia deportees recount harrowing treatment by ICE agents.
As it ran on the front
Here is a magic trick you can watch happen in real time. A sitting member of Congress says ICE is terrorizing little kids. The border czar gets on camera within the day to fire back, deny it, call it slander against the agents. Fine, that's Tuesday. Except the same week, deportees who got shipped off to Liberia — a country most of them had no ties to — are sitting down with reporters describing, in their own words, what the agency did to them on the way out the door. Nobody scripted that timing. It just happened, because it always happens, because the denial and the receipt travel together now like a matched set.
I want you to notice the size of the gap between 'terrorizing little kids' and 'fires back.' Nobody fired back with a policy memo. Nobody fired back with body-camera footage. They fired back with adjectives — outrage, slander, politics. That's not a defense, that's a flinch. An agency with nothing to hide doesn't need a rebuttal tour, it needs a paper trail, and the paper trail we do have is the Liberia one, and it isn't flattering.…
…(cont) This is the oldest move in the government's book: when the accusation lands on children, you don't argue the facts, you argue the tone. You say the Senator is being dramatic. You say the reporting is one-sided. You never once say 'here is exactly what happened at that facility, on that day, to that kid,' because the honest version of that sentence doesn't survive contact with the public.
Meanwhile the people who actually lived it are on the record, in Liberia, with names and details, describing what the denial was denying. They didn't have a talking point to sell. They just had the thing that happened to them, which is a lot harder to walk back than a cable hit.
You want to know who this costs? Not the czar. Not the agency. It costs the kid whose file this is, sitting in a country he has never seen, while a man in Washington gets to call the accurate description of his removal 'terrorizing,' as if the word were the crime, and not the removal itself.
“The border czar goes on TV to insist nobody's terrorizing kids, and the same week people shipped off to Liberia are describing exactly what happened to them on the way out. When the denial and the receipt land in the same news cycle, believe the receipt — that's the whole method, deny loud, ship quiet.”
“Look, 'harrowing' is doing a lot of work in one writeup, and the Secretary's point stands — these are lawful removals, standard procedure, nothing that would — well, I haven't reviewed the Liberia accounts myself, so I can't speak to specifics, but the underlying policy is sound, that's my position.”
The receipts
Tom Homan pushed back on claims ICE targeted parents at a school bus stop in Danbury, Connecticut, as DHS called the allegation politically motivated.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.