White House border czar Tom Homan dismissed Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon's claim that ICE racially profiles Black Americans, calling it "ridiculous", and the Department of Homeland Security backed him up with a pointed formal denial.
Homan appeared on the Fox News program "Saturday in America" to respond directly to Nixon, a Florida state representative who recently won her party's Senate primary. Nixon had accused ICE of operating as a "weaponized paramilitary force" designed to terrorize Black communities, a charge Homan called flatly dishonest and unsupported by how the agency operates.
Homan told host Kayleigh McEnany that ICE follows the law, not racial criteria, in deciding whom to approach and arrest.
"That's a ridiculous statement. We don't racially profile. Everybody we talk to, we have reasonable suspicion of aliens to talk to them and to arrest them we need probable cause. That's what the law says. And that's what we do."
He went further, framing Nixon's accusations as part of a broader pattern of dishonesty aimed at undermining immigration enforcement officers.
"It's just lie, after lie, after lie, to try to vilify the men and women of ICE."
Homan also pushed back on any suggestion that enforcement targets a single racial or ethnic group, pointing to the global scope of ICE's work.
"We don't arrest people based on the color of their skin. I'm actually an equal opportunity deporter. I deported people to 180 countries last year."
"I don't care if you're from Asia, you're from Europe or you're from other countries. If you're in the country illegally, you will be deported, regardless of the color of your skin."
The Department of Homeland Security did not wait for Homan's television appearance to respond. In a statement issued to Fox News Digital on Friday, DHS rejected Nixon's racial profiling allegations outright, saying immigration status, not race or ethnicity, determines who ICE targets for enforcement.
The department's language left no room for ambiguity. The New York Post reported that DHS called Nixon's comments "disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE." The department also highlighted a dramatic surge in violence directed at its own personnel: a 1,300% increase in assaults on ICE agents, a 3,300% increase in vehicular attacks, and an 8,000% increase in death threats, numbers that suggest the heated rhetoric around immigration enforcement carries real-world consequences for the people doing the enforcing.
Those figures put Nixon's language in sharper relief. When a Senate nominee calls a federal law enforcement agency a "weaponized paramilitary force," the officers on the receiving end of that characterization are the same ones facing record threats.
Nixon's comments came during an appearance on the "QNA: Questions Need Answers" podcast, where she accused Republicans of "literally trying to kill us" and described ICE operations in Black communities as "state-sanctioned violence."
Her exact words on the podcast went beyond standard policy criticism:
"Like, actually state-sanctioned violence. They've been doing it in the Black community. And they're doing it even more so now with ICE. ICE is now a weaponized paramilitary force that is designed to terrorize us."
Her campaign website lists abolishing ICE and ending detention centers among her key policy priorities. Nixon argues that mass incarceration and mass deportation are "moral failures" and that ICE "cannot be trusted with the power it has." She contends the agency's "terror tactics" should be dismantled entirely.
That platform is not a minor plank buried in a long issues page. It is a defining feature of her candidacy. Nixon won Florida's Democratic Senate primary on August 18, defeating Alexander Vindman by nearly 12 points, an upset made more striking by the fundraising gap. Vindman had amassed a $16.27 million campaign fund compared to Nixon's approximately $1 million. She now faces Republican Sen. Ashley Moody in November.
A candidate who ran on abolishing ICE, won a primary against a far better-funded opponent, and then immediately accused federal agents of racial terrorism is not operating on the fringe of her party's base. She is testing how far left a general-election Senate candidate in Florida can go.
Homan did not limit his response to denying Nixon's accusations. He turned the argument around, blaming sanctuary city policies, the kind Nixon's broader platform supports, for making communities and officers less safe.
He pointed to the case of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was fatally shot in Houston in July during an ICE arrest attempt. Homan argued that sanctuary policies force ICE agents to conduct arrests on the street rather than picking up suspects from local jails, raising the danger for everyone involved.
"What sanctuary cities do is not only... give sanctuaries to criminals, it makes the community less safe because they're releasing public safety threats back into the public."
"It puts our officers at greater risk. It puts the alien at greater risk because anything can happen during a street arrest."
The logic is straightforward. When local jurisdictions refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, ICE agents cannot collect suspects in controlled settings. They end up making arrests in homes, parking lots, and neighborhoods, exactly the kind of confrontations that can escalate. Homan's argument is that the politicians who create sanctuary policies bear responsibility for the consequences those policies produce.
Nixon offered no specific evidence of ICE racial profiling in her podcast remarks. She cited no case files, no internal directives, no statistical analysis, and no whistleblower testimony. She offered a sweeping accusation, that a federal agency is "designed to terrorize" Black Americans, and left it at that.
Homan, by contrast, cited the legal standards ICE follows: reasonable suspicion to approach, probable cause to arrest. DHS stated plainly that immigration status, not race, drives enforcement decisions. Whether one finds those assurances sufficient is a fair debate. But Nixon did not engage in that debate. She skipped past evidence and went straight to the most inflammatory language available.
Florida voters will decide in November whether that approach belongs in the U.S. Senate. The rest of the country will be watching to see whether a candidate can run on abolishing a federal law enforcement agency and accusing it of racial terror, and pay no political price for it.
When politicians hurl accusations they cannot support, the people who suffer are the officers still required to do the job.
