White House border czar Tom Homan rejected claims that ICE officers arrest parents at bus stops in Connecticut. But there is no argument that arrests are up nationwide. Lana Zak reports from Stamford, Connecticut.
Page A14From§Eachthe late evening edition — 30 August 2026
Border czar denies ICE arrests kids at bus stops; agency's own program already deports people to Africa.
As it ran on the front
NO POLICY, NO PATTERN, NO PROBLEM
Let's be precise about what did and did not happen, because precision matters here and I intend to provide it. There is no directive, no memo, no standing order authorizing enforcement actions at school bus stops. None. A senator from Connecticut made a claim. The border czar, on the record, rejected that claim. That is the extent of the story: a claim, and a rejection of the claim. Two sentences. Nothing else occurred.…
…(cont) Now, separately — and I want to stress separately, because these are not related programs, they are administered by different desks even though they happen to share a building and a budget line — the agency also operates what is formally known as third-country removal. This is a lawful mechanism by which individuals who cannot be returned to their country of origin are relocated to a cooperating third nation. Afghans, for instance. To countries in Africa, for instance. It is expanding, yes, that's accurate, I'm not going to sit here and tell you it isn't expanding, that would be — that would actually be false, and I try not to say false things in this chair, I say things that are technically defensible, which is different.
So to be clear: no, we are not detaining children at bus stops, that would be a public relations catastrophe of the first order and also I believe illegal in a way even this administration would — well. We are, however, running an increasingly geographically ambitious relocation program for people who have never been to the countries we are sending them to, and that part is confirmed, on the record, by us. I understand that having both of those true at once, in the same news cycle, from the same building, invites a certain inference. I'm not here to invite inference. I'm here to tell you there is no policy, there is no pattern, and there is, I will grant you, one very large and expanding operation that is not the thing the senator described, but is a thing.
That's the statement. I'm not taking questions on the flights.
“The border czar goes on television and says nobody's grabbing kids at the bus stop, don't believe your own senator. Meanwhile that same agency's running a standing program flying people to a third country they've never set foot in. When the denial is that specific and the operation is that big, the denial is the tell.”
“There is no policy of enforcement at school bus stops, that would be a communications catastrophe, the Senator is simply mistaken about the location. As for removals to Africa, that's a wholly separate, lawful third-country process — unrelated, though I understand how it looks when I say both in the same paragraph.”
The receipts
Over a 10-day period, the Trump administration sent more than 100 deportees from Afghanistan, Cuba and other nations to eight countries across Africa, according to internal government documents obtained by CBS News.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.