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 A8From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
ICE's border czar denies arresting children at bus stops the same week the agency expands deportations to Africa.
As it ran on the front
Let's take these one at a time, because conflating them is exactly how misinformation spreads. The claim from the Connecticut senator is that ICE made arrests at school bus stops. The border czar has rejected that claim, categorically, on the record. That should be the end of it. A senator's claim versus an on-the-record denial from the agency itself — I don't see why we're still discussing it.
Now, separately, the agency has confirmed it's expanding what's called third-country deportation — sending Afghan nationals and others to African countries rather than their countries of origin. That's a logistics story. That's about capacity, about agreements with receiving nations, about — look, I understand how it sounds when I say 'logistics' about human beings, that's not — let me come back to that.…
…(cont) The point I want to land is that there's no contradiction between denying one specific allegation and confirming a broader program is expanding. An agency can reject a claim about bus stops and expand operations in Africa in the same week without those two facts touching each other at all. They're in different columns of the same report, is what I'm — actually, they're the same report. They're literally the same agency, the same week, the same statement cycle. I see how that lands.
Here's what I'd ask people to consider: an agency that's confident enough to publicly reject a state senator's account of arrests near a school is not an agency that's hiding, and an agency that's expanding a removal program to new receiving countries is not an agency that's slowing down. Both of those things being true at once is either a sign of transparency or a sign that the denial and the expansion are the same posture wearing two faces. I'm not going to tell you which. I already told you which.
What I will say, on the record, one more time, clearly: the agency denies the specific claim. The agency confirms the broader expansion. Those are two sentences. I did not connect them. You connected them. I'm just reading you the statements.
“An agency confident enough to publicly deny arresting kids at a bus stop is not an agency hiding anything, it's an agency that knows the denial and the deportation program are the same policy wearing two faces. Deny the small headline, expand the big program — that's the whole playbook.”
“The border czar's denial and the Africa expansion are two completely unrelated matters that happen to be the same agency in the same week — logistics is not the same conversation as allegations, and I'd ask people to keep them separate. That's — I hear how that sounds, they're the same report.”
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.