Tom Homan Is Deploying Armed Agents to Punish New York City

Tom Homan is deploying armed agents to punish New York City.

You made a promise, Mr. Homan, and you are keeping it: retaliation for a state’s decision to stop lending its jail cells to your deportation machine. Governor Hochul signed the bill last month because New Yorkers demanded an end to the entanglement of local police with federal deportation operations. Your response, in your own words, is “more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen in New York City.” You reviewed an operational plan. Whether it stays on your desk or you roll it onto the streets, you broadcast it as a punishment — not because the law demands it, but because you were defied. That is not enforcement. That is punishment. That is what an empire does to a province that refuses to cooperate with the legions.

The world is about to arrive in New York. The Knicks are in the finals, the World Cup final will play ten miles away, and ten million visitors will flood the region. For immigrant communities in every borough, the flashing lights these visitors will not see are the ones on the unmarked cars pulling up to their doors while the city cheers. Immigrant rights groups have already warned that traveling to this country under the current administration risks serious rights violations, including arbitrary detention and deportation. You are not concealing the threat, Mr. Homan. You are broadcasting it. The World Cup is the stage, and the show of force is the message you want the world to see. The administration does not care if the world is watching.

At least eighteen people have died in your custody this year. In January, your officers killed two American citizens in Minneapolis in the span of weeks — Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. A deportation machine that kills its own citizens while hunting immigrants is a machine that has lost the distinction between who is and who is not a person. When you deploy it as a punishment for a state that refused to help you feed it, you are not restoring order. You are making the machine the point.

You did not build this machine, Mr. Homan. Every administration for a century has built it, funded it, and fed it bodies, as Adam Goodman has documented. We helped construct the apparatus you are now aiming at New York. When the machinery of detention is built, it will never be used only on the people you intend. The Hebrew prophets warned that the state which crushes the needy to protect its own power will eventually turn on the innocent in its own streets. You do not get to build a cage for the stranger and pretend it will never hold your own.

“I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” You know the sentence, Mr. Homan, from Matthew 25, the sheep and the goats, the judgment that does not ask about which laws were broken but about which bodies were recognized as the body of Christ. The Torah repeats the commandment to love the ger — the resident alien — more than thirty times, anchoring it in the memory of having been a stranger in Egypt. “You shall not oppress a resident alien,” the book of Exodus commands, “for you know the heart of an alien.” You do know, Mr. Homan, or you would not be speaking of New York as a problem to be solved with more guns. The knowledge is in you, and you are acting against it.

You wrap the threat in the flag and cite statutory authority. But the rule of law does not mean flooding a city with armed men to create a climate of terror so profound that a community cannot leave their homes. The texts you invoke when it suits you demand that you love your neighbor as yourself. You are weaponizing the state against the very neighbors those texts command you to protect. The gap between your words and your work is the measure of the betrayal.

A humane immigration policy would recognize the humanity of the people who bake the bread, build the stadiums, and fill the stands for the World Cup. It would offer a path to dignity and reject the use of terror as a tool of statecraft. The alternative to your operational plan is not anarchy. It is a community that protects the vulnerable, honors the guest, and refuses to trade its soul for the illusion of security.

Archbishop Romero, on the night he was killed for telling the soldiers to stop, stood in the cathedral and said, “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!” He said it to soldiers who were his own countrymen, and he said it as a pastor who loved them. I am not Romero. But I am telling you, in his name and in the name of the man whose red letters I live by: you can stop. The operation can be shelved. The agents can be recalled. The threat can become yesterday’s news. You do not have to become the man who occupied a city of immigrants while the world was watching. You can let the street vendors keep their carts and their mornings. You can look at the face of the person you are threatening and see a neighbor, not a target. The door is open. Walk through it.