White House border czar Tom Homan said Thursday he’s “sure” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have detained U.S. citizens, “but we don’t deport them.”

Homan told reporters outside the White House that U.S. citizens have “nothing to fear.”

“We deport people that are going to be deportable,” he continued. “We arrest people that will be deportable based on suspicion. Have U.S. citizens ever been shortly detained based on suspicion? I’m sure. I’m sure.”

If ICE officers determine that someone is “not the guy we’re looking for, you are released,” Homan said before adding, “But we don’t deport U.S. citizens.”

U.S. citizens have been caught up in federal immigration enforcement sweeps across the country since President Trump returned to the White House last year. In March, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) accused ICE’s parent department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of detaining U.S. citizens.

Jayapal introduced four citizens who gave their accounts of being detained by ICE during a House Judiciary Committee hearing. She asked the four Americans, part of the audience in the hearing room, if they were charged with a crime; none of them said they were charged.

“DHS is supposed to be protecting our residents and upholding constitutional protections, but you’ve turned that on the head,” Jayapal told former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during that hearing. “You have actually turned the United States government against its own residents.”

One of the reforms that Democratic lawmakers called for with ICE ahead of the near 80-day funding lapse at the DHS was a ban on deporting U.S. citizens.

“In what country are we living in if it’s controversial to prohibit [the deportation] of American citizens?” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters at the Capitol in January. “That shouldn’t even be a discussion.”

Sweeps have also included some U.S.-citizen children whose parents faced deportation. Administration officials previously said those minors were not deported but that their parents elected to take them with them rather than be separated.

This included a 2-year-old U.S. citizen who was deported to Honduras with his mother and sister without “meaningful process,” U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said in April 2025.

“The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty wrote in legal documents. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”

Homan said at the time that immigrants who have children born in the U.S. are not “immune” from being deported.

“American families get separated every day by law enforcement,” he told CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

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