Editor's note: This story was updated to accurately reflect former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's title. White House border czar Tom Homan on Sunday said federal immigration enforcement authorities "get them out quick" after officials…
Page A4From§Eachthe early evening edition — 30 August 2026
ICE's Homan says 'get them out quick,' denies agency 'terrorizes' children same week.
As it ran on the front
THIS DESK STANDS BY THE STATEMENT: ICE DOES NOT TERRORIZE CHILDREN, AND ALSO WE SHOULD GET THEM OUT QUICK
Let's be clear about what Border Czar Tom Homan actually said, because there has been some confusion, mostly caused by him saying two things in the same week. On the removal of Milo Yiannopoulos, Homan's guidance was simple, operational, almost administrative: get them out quick. This is a statement about efficiency. It is not — and I want to be precise here — a statement about how the agency treats the people being gotten out quick. Those are two different conversations and anyone conflating them is not being fair to the timeline.…
…(cont) Separately, and this is the important part, when a Democratic senator claimed ICE 'terrorizes' children, Homan took that claim head-on, according to the Daily Caller, and the agency's position is that this is not accurate. It is not accurate because the agency's mission is removal, carried out efficiently, quickly, sometimes very quickly — did I say quickly twice? I did. That's not a contradiction, that's — okay, it might read like a contradiction if you put the two quotes next to each other, which nobody should do, because context matters, and the context is that 'quick' means quick, and 'not terrorizing' means not terrorizing, and those words were said by the same man in the same general period about the same agency, which, fine, is a contradiction, but it's an operational one.
The agency stands by both statements as issued. It stands by the efficiency of the removals and it stands by the characterization that this efficiency does not amount to terror, even though 'get them out quick' and 'we don't terrorize kids' are, when you actually read them together like that, kind of the same sentence pointed in different directions. I did not intend to write that sentence. I'm going to leave it in, because striking it would look worse.
The senator's underlying claim — that children experience the speed of an ICE operation as fear — has not been independently disproven here, only denied, by the person running the operations. That is the extent of the rebuttal available at this time. We stand by it. We stand by the speed. We are less sure, having written this, what else we're standing on.
“One week: 'get 'em out quick' on a deportation, then 'we don't terrorize kids' on the Sunday shows — you don't issue that second statement unless somebody already asked the first question loud enough to matter. The speed of the removal and the speed of the denial are the same speed.”
“Director Homan was very clear: 'get them out quick' refers to logistics, not policy — I mean, it is the policy, but the phrasing was about logistics. And when he says the agency doesn't terrorize children, that's the actual policy statement, so disregard the first part, this is fine.”
The receipts
The UN torture rapporteur found direct-contact electric shock gloves "incompatible with the absolute prohibition of torture" - ICE plans to spend up to $20 million on them ABC10 San Diego / UN Special Rapporteur finding, August 2026
Tom Homan Takes Dem Senator’s Claim That ICE Terrorizes Kids Head-On‘ICE is not in the business of terrorizing children’
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.