Arizona Democrats walk out of speech by Trump’s ‘asshole’ border czar

Republicans invited Tom Homan, who has led Trump's mass deportation efforts, to address the Arizona Legislature on Tuesday.

By TJ L'Heureux

April 8, 2025

At noon on Tuesday, in front of a joint session of the Arizona Legislature, Trump administration “border czar” Tom Homan stepped to the rostrum to give a speech. Then, one by one, 19 Arizona Democrats walked out of the room, holding signs with the names of Arizona residents taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I love it,” Homan said with a smile. “Thank you for making my day.”

Homan was invited by Republicans to tout Trump’s mass deportation efforts, which he pitched as a necessary undertaking to combat an invasion of the country by hardened criminals. “Homan is leading historic efforts to restore efforts at the southern border,” said Arizona House Speaker Steve Montenegro before Homan’s speech. Senate President Warren Peterson, a Queen Creek Republican, said the Trump administration is “removing the most dangerous criminal illegal aliens from the streets.”

In reality, the agencies Homan oversees have indiscriminately scooped up people without criminal records or with seemingly fabricated ones the administration uses as a pretext to send them to a prison in El Salvador. Migrants with no criminal history who are in the U.S. legally have been caught up in the Trump crackdown.

The Trump administration has also garnered attention for mistakenly disappearing people, for detaining and even deporting American citizens, for stripping protections from refugees and for targeting legal residents. Not all of that has to do with Homan — some of it has been done at the behest of Secretary of State Marco Rubio — but Homan’s fingerprints are on a lot of it.

Perhaps “disappearer-in-chief” would be a more apt title than “border czar,” though at a protest outside the Capitol, one Arizona Democrat had another suggestion.

“Did you guys hear what that asshole said when we held up our signs of the people he has disappeared?” state Sen. Analise Ortiz said at a press conference. “These fools take pleasure in our families being torn apart and separated. It is disgusting. It is cruel. It is inhumane, and Homan is not welcome here.”

Homan’s speech

Other than a shoutout to former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was in attendance, Homan’s speech had little to do with Arizona.

He mostly cherry-picked naming some of the most heinous crimes perpetrated by immigrants and recited misinformation, at one point claiming that border crossings had gone down 94% in a matter of months. (They are down, but only by that amount when compared to a year ago.) Homan also claimed the Trump administration had alreadymade more arrestsin a few months than the Biden administration had in four years,which is blatantly false.

As Homan patted his own back with false claims, he also said he wasn’t satisfied.

“I want more,” Homan said. “There’s hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens in this nation with criminal records that are walking the streets. We need to find every single one of ‘em and get ‘em out of this country.”

Homan has also previously advocated for deporting some U.S.-born citizens as the Trump administration has attempted — unsuccessfully so far — to end birthright citizenship. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also said Tuesday that Trump is considering deporting some citizens with criminal records.

“If an ICE agent can point at anyone and say, ‘You don’t belong here and you don’t get due process,’ what’s to stop them from coming after American citizens?” Ortiz asked. “They already are.”

Homan’s visit to the Arizona Legislature comes as the American people are rising in greater numbers against the Trump administration’s overt abuses of power. Record-breaking protests of the Trump administration swept the nation Saturday from New York City to Alaska — Arizona included — in one of the largest single-day protests the United States has seen in years.

Victoria López, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, urged opposition to the mass deportation regime. Notably, Republicans in the state legislature have pushed bills to mandate more cooperation with immigration authorities, though Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs seems unlikely to sign them should they pass.

“At the state level, we must resist laws and policies that help fuel Trump’s mass deportation agenda,” López said. “Not only do they divert resources from critical needs like housing, education and health care, they also erode the constitutional rights and liberties that we hold, like free speech and due process.”

Political theater

Democrats’ exodus from the chamber seemed to rankle Homan, who returned to it multiple times during his 30-minute speech.

“They don’t want to sit here and listen to what I gotta say,” he said at one point. “They’d much rather walk out of the room.”

State Rep. Betty Villegas, a Tucson Democrat, called the decision to invite Homan to the Capitol “theater” and ripped Trump’s decisions to disobey court orders and strip deportees of due process rights.

“These are not just numbers, they are people — people with families, who go to church, who run businesses, who care for our sick and elderly,” Villegas said. “(Montenegro) said, ‘We want to follow the rule of law.’ Not having due process is not following the rule of law.”

Faith Ramon, an organizing manager with Living United for Change in Arizona and member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, said Homan and Trump had abandoned all pretext of due process. She mentioned Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was arrested in New York and sent to a detention center in Louisiana after exercising First Amendment rights and protesting the U.S. funding Israel’s war in Gaza.

“The message to Black and brown people across the country is clear: Stay silent, stay invisible or be disappeared,” Ramon said. “If they’re immigrants, their legal status does not matter. Their rights don’t matter. If you dare speak against Trump, if you organize, if your skin is Black or brown, you are a target.”

After the speech, Republican lawmakers and men dressed up in cowboy hats walked from the House chamber into the old Arizona Capitol building while protesters chanted, “Go home, Homan!” State Sen. Anna Abeytia didn’t mince words when attributing an ideological motivation to Republicans’ deportation zeal.

“Today’s Republican Party is being led by people who are more interested in advancing their fascist, white supremacist agenda,” she said, “than following the law.”

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