The Briefing
- Border czar Tom Homan told a Justice Department audience Thursday that ICE will "surge resources and flood the zone" in sanctuary cities, reaffirming past threats against New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
- ICE has logged 356,389 removals so far in fiscal 2026 through mid-July, already ahead of last year's full-year total and on pace to challenge the Obama-era record, according to ICE data reported by ABC News.
- Homan's remarks came days after an ICE officer shot and seriously wounded a Venezuelan DoorDash driver in Austin, and just after a Costa Rican detainee's death pushed the in-custody toll to 58 since the start of Trump's second term.
A defiant border czar, an agency under fire
Speaking at the Justice Department's inaugural Attorney General's Summit on Victims of Violent Crime in Washington on Thursday, Homan brushed aside weeks of controversy over his agency's conduct. "You can hate us all you want. We're not going anywhere," he told the crowd, according to The Hill's account of the event.
He went further, pledging that immigration agents would keep concentrating manpower in cities that limit cooperation with federal authorities. He did not bring up the Austin shooting, in which an ICE officer wounded 28-year-old delivery driver Wilber Rafael Garces Perez while he was working a DoorDash shift, according to CNN's reporting on the incident and his attorney's account. Garces Perez was shot once in the back after officers rammed his vehicle during what DHS later called a targeted stop; his lawyer has said he now faces possible paralysis, per a separate CNN update.
What the '58' figure actually means
Homan's Thursday appearance came just six days after Carlos Josué Marchena Marchena, a Costa Rican national, died at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana — a death that advocates and a widely shared social post marked as the 58th in ICE custody, a count that runs from the start of the second Trump administration in January 2025, not from the beginning of this calendar year. That distinction matters: tracking focused specifically on 2026 puts the toll at a minimum of 27 deaths as of Sept. 22, according to the National Immigration Project. Either way, the pace is historic — Human Rights Watch found the mortality rate in ICE custody had more than doubled since Trump's second term began, based on the 52 deaths recorded in the administration's first 500 days. ICE has not issued its own confirmed tally for either time frame.
Record numbers, real caveats
The bravado lines up with an enforcement operation running faster than at any point in over a decade. ICE's own biweekly release shows the agency booked people into detention at an average of 1,438 a day in June, according to TRAC Reports' quick-facts tracker, with the detained population sitting at nearly 66,000 — a historic high, per ABC News' review of the same ICE dataset. Those are the most recent verified public figures; ICE typically pauses its releases in the final weeks of the fiscal year, meaning more current numbers won't surface until after Sept. 30.
Five metros, five different fights
New York: Homan has repeatedly promised to send an unprecedented wave of agents into the city over Mayor Zohran Mamdani's sanctuary stance, telling Fox News in July that he'd already reviewed "an operational plan" and that the surge is "coming," a threat detailed in Fox News' report on the standoff and echoed in NBC New York's coverage of the exchange.
Los Angeles: The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights runs a volunteer rapid-response hotline that dispatches legal observers the moment ICE activity is reported — a model that has since been replicated by advocacy networks in several other states.
Houston: FIEL executive director Cesar Espinosa has kept pressure on local officials, arguing that jail-based cooperation with ICE already amounts to mass deportation without a formal city agreement. "Harris County has been the number one deporter in the country," he told demonstrators at a January rally covered by CW39 Houston.
Chicago: DHS says Operation Midway Blitz produced more than 4,500 arrests in its opening 68-day fall surge alone, but a case-level analysis by the Chicago Tribune found closer to 3,800 people were actually processed through local facilities, and a companion Chicago Sun-Times/WBEZ review found 85% had no prior criminal conviction and only five people with murder convictions were detained in that entire window — a gap between rhetoric and results that Chicago advocates now cite as their central warning to other cities.
Miami: Immigrant-rights coalitions spent the summer pressing city commissioners to unwind a 287(g) agreement that deputizes local police to act on ICE's behalf, arguing the deal, detailed by WLRN's coverage of the City Hall standoff, has made residents afraid to call police for ordinary emergencies. Florida now has 325 such agreements statewide, a jump of more than 500% since 2025, according to Axios' analysis of ICE data.
What 'not going anywhere' signals next
None of the five cities got a direct mention from Homan on Thursday, but his language tracks almost word for word with past warnings aimed at sanctuary jurisdictions — and Chicago's experience shows those warnings translate into thousands of arrests, not just talk. With fiscal 2026 removals already outpacing the prior two years and no policy reversal in sight, advocacy groups in these five metros are treating "flood the zone" as an operational forecast, not a soundbite.
