Trump Border Czar Has Gruesome Response to Man Dying in ICE Custody

Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan couldn’t care less that people are dying in ICE custody.

A reporter asked Homan Monday to respond to reports that Isidro Perez, a 75-year-old Cuban man who’d been living in the United States for nearly 60 years, died last week in ICE custody.

“I’m unaware of that, I’m not aware of that. I mean people die in ICE custody, people die in county jail, people die in state prisons,” Homan replied, brushing off that a man had just died on his watch.

“The question should be how many lives does ICE save? Because when they go in detention, we find many with diseases and stuff that we deal with right away to prevent that,” Homan said. Perez is at least the twelfth person to die in ICE custody so far this year, a notable uptick from previous years in line with the Trump administration’s directive to increase the rates of ICE arrests.

“People can argue with me all they want, but the facts are the facts. I think the politicians in New Jersey found this out, that we have the highest detention standards in the industry,” Homan said. He was referring to a group of three lawmakers the Department of Homeland Security previously claimed had stormed Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, last month.

Homan claimed that the lawmakers had found the standards of the 1,000-bed ICE detention facility to be “outstanding” and added that it was “probably the cleanest facility in that entire state.”

But crucially, the lawmakers who visited Delaney Hall last month never completed their inspection of the newly reopened ICE facility. A court filing in Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s lawsuit against Alina Habba, New Jersey’s acting U.S. attorney, stated that lawmakers were kept in a waiting room inside the facility for over an hour before they departed to join Baraka outside, where a wild confrontation ensued, resulting in Baraka’s arrest and landing Representative LaMonica McIver with assault charges, to which she pleaded not guilty last week.

New guidelines released by ICE this month asserted that lawmakers are not permitted to inspect ICE field offices and must give three days’ notice before arriving to inspect another facility, in violation of federal law. ICE claimed that lawmakers have no right to inspect field offices, because they are not detention centers, though the agency routinely holds immigrants at field offices and does not distinguish between those offices and larger detention centers, according to Democracy Docket.

Despite the illegality of ICE’s rule, lawmakers have been repeatedly locked out of ICE facilities. “They are undergoing conditions that are inhumane, in my opinion. They were not able to change their underwear for 10 days,” said California Representative Judy Chu, after she was blocked from entering a facility outside of Los Angeles.

Instead of encouraging more visits, Homan referred individuals concerned over safety standards to ICE’s website.

“Go to ICE.gov and look at our detention standards; it’s the highest detention standards in the industry at a very expensive cost to the taxpayers,” Homan said, adding: “Go look for yourself and then come back to me.”

ICE facilities’ poor conditions are well documented. The agency recently renewed a contract with a facility that was previously decommissioned for its failure to comply with health standards, and the DHS has been quick to brag about its “Alligator Alcatraz” tent facility in the middle of the Florida Everglades.

President Trump’s Department of Justice is suing the city of Los Angeles on the grounds that its sanctuary city policy is an obstruction to the federal government’s mass deportation campaign.

“The challenged law and policies of the City of Los Angeles obstruct the Federal Government’s enforcement of federal immigration law and impede consultation and communication between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials that is necessary for federal officials to carry out federal immigration law and keep Americans safe,” the lawsuit, filed Monday, reads.

The DOJ is looking to overturn Ordinance Number 188441, which prevents Los Angeles’s resources, local police included, from being used for federal immigration enforcement as part of the city’s sanctuary status.

“Sanctuary policies were the driving cause of the violence, chaos, and attacks on law enforcement that Americans recently witnessed in Los Angeles,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement Monday. “Jurisdictions like Los Angeles that flout federal law by prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens are undermining law enforcement at every level—it ends under President Trump.”

This is yet another installment in Trump’s monthslong beef with the city of Los Angeles and California as a whole. He slashed crucial federal funding to the state, and deployed the National Guard and the Marines without the approval of Governor Gavin Newsom to crush anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. This lawsuit is driven by spite.

Donald Trump is trying to squeeze American rice supplies into Japan without a trade negotiation.

In a Truth Social post Monday afternoon, the president claimed that the Japanese people and their government were “spoiled” because they wouldn’t buy American rice. He then promised to send them a “letter,” in which he would assert the current rate of trade between the two nations.

“To show people how spoiled Countries have become with respect to the United States of America, and I have great respect for Japan, they won’t take our RICE, and yet they have a massive rice shortage,” Trump wrote, casually insulting the nation with which America has one of its largest trading relationships. “In other words, we’ll just be sending them a letter, and we love having them as a Trading Partner for many years to come.”

Japan has been struggling with a rice crisis for the last couple of years. The grain, which is a foundational ingredient in Japanese cooking, first started slipping from supermarket shelves in 2023, when extreme heat waves led to low crop yields. Then, a possible “megaquake” warning last year inspired people to panic-buy the pantry essential. The ensuing shortage has seen rice prices more than double since the crisis began, reaching between 4,500 and 5,000 yen, according to government data.

But Trump’s threat is particularly ill-timed, leaving the U.S. president with little negotiating power on the matter: Japan’s national supermarket association reported last week that the shortage appears to be easing, with prices for a five-kilogram bag dropping below 4,000 yen for the first time in the last two months, finally reaching the target goal set by Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.

Rice has become a sticking point in U.S.-Japanese trade negotiations. In March, Trump pledged to impose a 24 percent “reciprocal” tariff on Japanese imports, with its automobile and metals industries facing a slightly higher rate at 25 percent. Since a 1993 World Trade Organization arrangement, Japan has imported 770,000 metric tons of rice each year without tariffs—approximately half of which comes from the U.S., Time reported.

Changing the arrangement in favor of U.S. goods will face enormous pressure from Japanese leadership: the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been in power almost continuously since it was founded in 1955, has staunchly opposed adding a special quota for American rice imports.

The plea followed an embarrassing flub for America’s relationship with its longtime ally on Sunday, when Trump seemingly forgot the name of Japan’s prime minister in an interview with Fox News, instead referring to Ishiba as “Mr. Japan.”

In the same interview, Trump said that the letters would serve as the “end of the trade deal,” suggesting that no negotiations will take place after the White House hits the mailbox. “We don’t have to meet. We understand, we have all the numbers,” he said.

It’s not the first time that Trump has offered to stamp out trade talks by issuing a string of letters. He made similar promises on May 16 and June 11, claiming both times that the letters would be issued in a handful of weeks, though that never came to fruition.

The two musicians comprising the U.K. punk-rap duo Bob Vylan have had their U.S. visas revoked for leading chants against the Israeli Defense Forces during their performance at the Glastonbury Festival over the weekend.

The group has been under fire since leading the festival crowd in the chant, “Death, death to the IDF” on Saturday.

On Monday morning, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Laundau took to X to announce that the State Department “has revoked the US visas for the members of the Bob Vylan band.”

Landau described the decision as a retaliation against Bob Vylan “in light of” the chants at Glastonbury, which he described as a “hateful tirade” where the group led “death chants.”

“Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,” Laundau said.

The band, which has also been dropped by its talent agency, according to
The Hollywood Reporter, had upcoming tour dates scheduled in numerous U.S. cities.

Prior to the official announcement, the free speech advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, condemned reports that the State Department was looking into banning Bob Vylan for their expressive acts.

FIRE compared the then-planned ban to countries like Russia and China banning artists such as Selena Gomez and Katy Perry for speech that cuts against official state doctrine.

“Nations committed to free expression should not use their borders as a tool of censorship, as Russia and China have done with artists whose political expression they seek to silence,” FIRE posted. “Revoking visas from controversial musicians and artists doesn’t make our country freer or safer. But it may make it silent.”

This comes as the Trump administration pursues an aggressive campaign of revoking international students’ visas, including for political expression, such as pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Senator John Fetterman—known mostly for his basketball shorts, his disdain for participating at his fairly easy job, and his highly publicized mental health crisis—would rather be at the beach than in the Senate voting on Trump’s sweeping budget bill.

“Oh my God, I just wanna go home,” Fetterman said Monday in response to a question regarding when voting on the bill would end. “I’ve already … I’ve missed our entire trip to the beach, my family’s gonna be back before we … and again, I’m gonna vote ‘no,’ there’s no drama. The votes are gonna go. In fact the only interesting votes are gonna be on the margin, whether that’s [Susan] Collins, [Ron] Johnson, and those, but all the Democrats, we all know how that’s gonna go. And I think—I don’t think it’s really helpful to put people here till some ungodly hour.”

While the Republicans’ Senate majority makes the bill’s passing highly likely, some Democrats are still speaking out rather than longing for vacation. 

“If you are concerned about health care, which I suspect that everybody in the world is, this bill throws over 16 million people off the health insurance they have, according to the Congressional Budget Office, by cutting Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by over $1.1 trillion,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said on Sunday night. “In other words, the top one percent [is] getting a $975 billion tax break, and that is coming directly by throwing 16 million people off of the health insurance they have.” 

But Fetterman has had a contentious relationship with the job he campaigned to do. That dynamic, combined with his mental health, extreme hatred of Palestinians, and his general rightward shift, only increase the questions surrounding his future as a Democratic senator, or as a senator at all.