Tom Homan pushed back on claims ICE targeted parents at a school bus stop in Danbury, Connecticut, as DHS called the allegation politically motivated.
Page A10From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
DHS denies torture, beatings in ICE custody; deportees to Liberia recount harrowing expulsion details
As it ran on the front
The Department of Homeland Security this week issued a full and unambiguous denial: no torture, no beatings, no medical neglect occurring in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, period, and this reporter finds no reason not to take the Department at its word, because that is what a denial is for.
Border czar Tom Homan was similarly direct, firing back at Senator Chris Murphy's claim that ICE is 'terrorizing little kids' with the kind of clarity you'd expect from a man confident in his agency's record — the agency does not target children, it targets removable individuals who happen in some cases to be children, which is a different thing entirely, and if that distinction sounds thin, that's because — no. That's not what this reporter meant to say. The distinction holds.…
…(cont) As for the deportees sent to Liberia who gave a detailed account of their treatment during expulsion to the New York Times — 'harrowing' is the word used, and this reporter will note that harrowing is a descriptive term, not a legal finding, and descriptive terms do not by themselves establish the specific allegations DHS denies, which are torture, beatings, and medical neglect, none of which — actually the account does describe treatment consistent with at least some of that language. That's an unfortunate overlap. It happens. Denials and firsthand accounts can exist in the same news cycle; that is what an ongoing review is designed to sort out, and DHS has said the matter is under review, which this reporter can confirm because DHS said it.
The point stands: the Department denies it. The deportees describe it. The border czar disputes the characterization of it. Somewhere between those three sentences is where this reporter is instructed to land, and he is landing there, on the denial, because that is the assignment. Whether the account from Liberia and the denial from Washington can both be filed as accurate is a question for people with more time than this reporter has been given, and frankly less faith in a press office that has never once been wrong before — except, this reporter notes, for the times logged in this same paragraph.
“DHS says there's no torture, no beatings, no medical neglect — case closed, according to the people running the place accused of it. Meanwhile the folks they shipped to Liberia are describing exactly that, on the record, in detail. When the agency doing the denying is the same agency doing the detaining, the denial isn't evidence, it's a job description.”
“The Department has been clear: these allegations are without merit, full stop, there's no pattern here — well, there's an internal review of a pattern, but that's standard procedure. Did I say pattern? I meant procedure.”
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
DHS denies reports of torture, beatings and medical neglect in ICE detentionThe Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Sunday denied a report in The New York Times about harsh treatment of migrants in immigration detention facilities. “Another day and another hoax about ICE detention from the @nytimes,” DHS…
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.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.