Homan Admits He Hasn't Seen Video of Fatal ICE Shooting He Defended on Air

Tom Homan went on "Face the Nation" Sunday, July 19, to defend ICE after two fatal shootings during vehicle stops within a single week. By the end of the interview, he was admitting he hadn't watched the video he was arguing about.

The case at the center of it: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant, was shot and killed by an ICE agent on July 7 while driving to work in Houston. ICE initially described the encounter as targeted immigration enforcement. It later came out that Salgado Araujo wasn't the target at all, according to The Daily Beast.

Days later, ICE agent David Brouillette fatally shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian-born father living and working in the U.S. legally, in a separate stop where Guerrero also wasn't the intended target, per The Daily Beast's reporting.

"Just Comply"

Homan's initial response to Brennan was blunt: the agents' vehicles had emergency lights and sirens, and Salgado Araujo would be alive if he'd complied with the stop. "Just comply," he said.

Brennan pushed back, noting that Salgado Araujo's family says he believed he was being robbed because the vehicle was unmarked and he had no idea federal agents were involved. She told Homan the videos his agency has released don't show any lights being activated.

Homan's answer shifted in real time. First he insisted the vehicles "have emergency lights." When Brennan asked if he'd actually seen video confirming lights were on, he said, "You've seen that on video? Because we haven't." When she asked what he meant, he asked her, "Seen what on video?"

Brennan clarified she meant the lack of evidence of lights or sirens in the released footage, and noted there were no body cameras on scene to settle the question either way.

Homan then conceded ground: "I have not seen the videos, but I am saying our vehicles are equipped with emergency lights. If they didn't activate the lights, then there's an issue there." He added he was only saying the vehicles "should have been equipped with lights and sirens," not that he could confirm they were used.

A Broader Pattern, Not an Isolated Incident

These aren't the only recent fatal ICE encounters. According to CBS News's transcript of the interview, Brennan also raised a man in Florida who fled agents and was struck and killed by a tractor trailer, and a fatal shooting in Maine that happened just days after the Houston incident. She asked Homan directly how he responds to people who say nothing has changed since a deadly streak of incidents in Minnesota earlier this year, referencing the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, which The Daily Beast reported had already fueled accountability calls against the agency.

Homan's response was to decline comment on ongoing investigations, saying cell phone video, city cameras, witness statements, and officer affidavits will all factor in once those investigations conclude. He noted that DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin had ordered a pause on vehicle-stop enforcement over agent safety concerns, a pause President Trump later reversed, according to Ground News's summary of the broadcast.

Homan also pivoted to blaming political rhetoric. He argued that Democratic officials and sanctuary-city protesters calling ICE illegitimate embolden people to resist federal agents, and said that regardless of what anyone thinks about immigration law, people should comply with law enforcement.

Complying with a lawful order from identified law enforcement reduces the odds of a violent outcome, and rhetoric dismissing ICE as illegitimate doesn't help anyone stay safe. But it doesn't answer the specific question Brennan was asking: whether the agents in these stops made themselves identifiable in the first place. If the vehicles were unmarked and lights weren't activated, telling grieving families their relatives should have "just complied" sidesteps the actual point of contention.

Body Cameras Still Not Deployed

According to Ground News's summary of the broadcast, Homan said ICE will equip all officers nationwide with body cameras and blamed delays on a government shutdown and Democratic opposition. He argued the cameras would "exonerate" officers by showing what they see during enforcement actions.

Nobody, including the border czar defending these shootings on national television, has full video of what happened in Houston. Homan asked Brennan whether she'd seen lights on video before admitting he hadn't watched it himself. If body cameras had been standard equipment on July 7, this entire back-and-forth would be unnecessary. The footage would either back Homan's account or contradict it.

Instead, two families are burying men who weren't even the targets of the operations that killed them, and the country is left relying on competing claims from an agency that, by its own border czar's admission, hasn't reviewed the tape it's using to make its case. Homan didn't give a timeline for when nationwide body camera deployment will actually happen.