FACT CHECK: Daily Kos Lying about ICE’s Tom Homan Quote, Misstating Law

13.07.2025 02:20

This article originally appeared at the Gateway Pundit’s Fact Check Bureau, TGPFactCheck.com

DailyKos misquotes Tom Homan on purpose, purposefully omitting the relevant parts of his quote in order to make him sound racist.
Dishonest left-wing activist writer also misstates relevant law, confusing ‘probable cause’ for ‘reasonable suspicion,’ where the latter is the relevant standard for police to detain someone.
Left-wing media trying to make Homan look racist, when his correctly-stated policies are the current law

OUR RATING: Journalistic Malpractice. Even Salon.com is ashamed.

Indicted Outlet: Emily Cahn Singer | Daily Kos | Link | Archive | July 11, 2025

Left-wing opposition to the Trump agenda typically relies on half-truths and outright lies. Left-wing individuals often, personally, do not believe in fundamental truths, so their efforts at dishonesty, sophistry, are seen as tactical concerns.

There’s no good faith interpretation of how Emily Cahn Singer misquoted Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan. When you compare what Homan really said, with how Singer quoted you, you see fundamental journalistic dishonesty at work.

Major Violations:

Dishonestly describe claims
Decontextualization
Major Misrepresentation of Source Material
Manipulative editing
Smearing
Misrepresentation

Singer’s article, “Trump’s racist ‘border czar’ admits ICE is breaking the law,” relies on a brief comment that Homan made on FoxNews.

The 1:26 video clip that they use is here:

From the video clip, you can see that Homan said this:

HOMAN: “Look, people need to understand ICE officers and border patrol, they don’t need ‘probable cause’ to walk up to somebody and briefly detain and question them. They just need the ‘totality of the circumstances’ right, they just go through their observation, you know, get ‘articulable facts’ based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions, like if a uniformed border patrol agent walks up to them at, for instance, a Home Depot, and they got all these articulable facts, plus a person walks away or runs away. Agents are trained what they need to detain somebody temporarily and question them. It’s not ‘probable cause,’ it’s ‘reasonable suspicion.’ We’re trained on that. And every agent, every six months, gets get Fourth Amendment training over and over again. These officers are really good what they do, and if this judge is going to make a decision that’s against what these officer trained what the what the law is based upon, then they’re going to shut down operations I think that’s, that’s their end game. They want ICE to stop doing this, but if they base it on the rule of law, they’ll find out border patrol and ICE are doing exactly what they’re doing in accordance with the law.”

Here is how the Daily Kos misquotes Homan:

“People need to understand ICE officers and Border Patrol, they don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,” Homan said on Fox News, adding that he says ICE agents can detain people “based on … their physical appearance.”

Here’s a screengrab from within the article in case they try to edit or update the article:

You’ll notice the ellipsis here hides the relevant context that the writer Singer is leaving out.

Let me rewrite the full Homan statement again and put in bold the way the Daily Kos quoted Homan from their own clip.

This is how Singer at the Daily Kos quoted from the full excerpt of Homan’s statement, with the quoted part bolded:

HOMAN: “Look, people need to understand ICE officers and border patrol, they don’t need ‘probable cause’ to walk up to somebody and briefly detain and question them. They just need the ‘totality of the circumstances’ right, they just go through their observation, you know, get ‘articulable facts’ based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions, like if a uniformed border patrol agent walks up to them at, for instance, a Home Depot, and they got all these articulable facts, plus a person walks away or runs away. Agents are trained what they need to detain somebody temporarily and question them. It’s not ‘probable cause,’ it’s ‘reasonable suspicion.’ We’re trained on that. And every agent, every six months, gets get Fourth Amendment training over and over again. These officers are really good what they do, and if this judge is going to make a decision that’s against what these officer trained what the what the law is based upon, then they’re going to shut down operations I think that’s, that’s their end game. They want ICE to stop doing this, but if they base it on the rule of law, they’ll find out border patrol and ICE are doing exactly what they’re doing in accordance with the law.”

By comparing the real quote to the quote they used, you can see an example of decontextualization and also major misrepresentation of source material.

The original point Homan is making is the accurate legal standard for law enforcement operating in the United States.

Here is the legal definition of the concept of “probable cause”: [1]

Although the Fourth Amendment states that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause”, it does not specify what “probable cause” actually means. The Supreme Court has attempted to clarify the meaning of the term on several occasions, while recognizing that probable cause is a concept that is imprecise, fluid and very dependent on context. In Illinois v. Gates, the Court favored a flexible approach, viewing probable cause as a “practical, non-technical” standard that calls upon the “factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent men […] act”.[fn] See Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 232 (1983).[/fn] Courts often adopt a broader, more flexible view of probable cause when the alleged offenses are serious.

And while that definition is vague, the important thing to remember is that it is the standard for police making an arrest. The legal standards are used to review whether law enforcement, in a particular situation, had enough reasoning in order to arrest someone.

This is in contrast to the standard for law enforcement to approach someone and simply ask them questions, this standard is known as “reasonable suspicion.”

The definition of “reasonable suspicion” is: [2]

Reasonable suspicion is a standard used in criminal procedure. Reasonable suspicion is used in determining the legality of a police officer’s decision to perform a search. When an officer stops someone to search the person, courts require that the officer has either a search warrant, probable cause to search, or a reasonable suspicion to search. In descending order of what gives an officer the broadest authority to perform a search, courts have found that the order is search warrant, probable cause, and then reasonable suspicion.

These two legal standards are what Homan is discussing in the news clip.

One of the key court cases relevant to this concept is Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), [4] the court case which initially defined ‘reasonable suspicion.’

The media is repeatedly focused on the “probable cause” standard, which is used to make an arrest, and is stricter. Homan is pointing out that law enforcement’s ability to start investigating an individual illegal immigrant, by walking up to them and talking, is, instead, based upon the “reasonable suspicion” standard.

And Homan is going through the list of things that give a basis for “reasonable suspicion.”

Homan lists out suspicious things that illegal immigrants might do in a given situation, and his list is:

Things the ICE agent generally observes
Whether the location is suspicious
Whether the occupation of the individual is known to have a lot of illegal immigrants
Whether their physical appearance is similar to that of a typical illegal immigrant
Whether their actions are suspicious, such as running away when an ICE agent approaches

This is the correct legal standard. Homan also clarifies that the ‘totality of the circumstances’ matters. This is also deliberate phrasing, based on legal precedent. Law enforcement is allowed to use common sense as long as their reasons are ‘articulable’ meaning that they can be clear about their reasoning and rationale.

Homan’s words are a little mumbled and his grammar is a little off in the response, but his legal analysis is spot on.

So in their article, Singer at the DailyKos relies on their low-information left-wing activists not to check the actual quote for context, not understand the relevant law, and not know the full context here, which matters a great deal.

The legal standard for police to stop and talk to someone on the street, and the standard to make an arrest, are two different legal standards.

Homan is talking about the legal standards his agents are using to simply go up and talk to people, to conduct an investigation, to determine if a law is being broken.

But because one legal standard is more well known, “probable cause” and another is much less known, “reasonable suspicion,” the article selectively misquotes Homan to make its point.

Law enforcement rightly uses the variety of outward signals that Homan identified in order to make those initial stops short of an arrest.

And since 1975, the sole reason for a stop cannot be the perceived ancestry of the individual being questioned. That case was United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873 (1975). [5] Law enforcement can use a combination of factors to justify their ‘reasonable suspicion’, but race cannot be the only factor. Homan’s reference to multiple “articulable facts” is consistent with that ruling.

Homan is not inventing new laws here, he is simply using the proper formulation and quoting the accurate law. Homan has been in law enforcement for decades, [3] and so it should come as no surprise that he accurately cites to the law. The idea that, on national television, Homan would say that he’s going to only approach illegal immigrants based on their race and skin color, is ridiculous.

It’s left-wing fantasies masquerading as journalism.

To recap, the Cahn Singer at the Daily Kos committed serious journalistic malpractice by:

Misquoting Homan in the first place
Not understanding the relevant legal standards, or misstating it on purpose
Removing the context and larger list that Homan was providing
Misquoting Homan to make him look like a racist, which is without any basis

But of course this all reveals what the DailyKos’ real motive is: to paint Homan as a racist. They are simply smearing Homan.

The goal is not to properly quote Homan and make good faith arguments, they are simply trying to smear Homan by misquoting him. By looking at what parts of the quote were quoted, you can see the agenda at work.

OUR RATING: Journalistic Malpractice. Even Salon.com is ashamed.

Bibliography:
1 ] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/probable_cause
2 ] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_suspicion
3 ] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/us/politics/trump-border-czar-thomas-homan.html
4 ] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/392/1/
5 ] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/422/873/

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