The assurance came first. 'ICE has about 30,000 employees,' Tom Homan said on State of the Union. 'They all go through vetting' [1].
Then Dana Bash put the court documents in front of him. The agent who shot and killed Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero during a traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine on July 13 had been accused of abuse by two former wives, and a judge had ordered him to forfeit any firearms [2].
Homan did not dispute the documents. 'No, if those of those are facts, he - I don't think he should ever have cleared vetting,' he said, and asked the questions the answer raises: 'How did the vetting process fail? Was that information not available? Did they not know?' [1] He added that he had not been involved in the investigations and did not know the specifics [1].
That is the border czar conceding, on the record, that the screening he had just vouched for did not screen.
Duran Guerrero was 25, a Colombian national, and had legal authorization to work in the United States.
Homan also said that 'on all vehicles stops, there's at least one body camera on site to record the entire event' [1]. In this stop there was not - the officers were not wearing them [2], which is why the account of what happened rests on witnesses rather than footage.
Acting ICE director David Venturella has since issued interim guidance requiring body-worn cameras during vehicle stops, and DHS has signed more than $30 million in camera contracts [3]. Both are concessions in the same direction, arriving after a man was killed.
A note on precision: two outlets transcribed Homan's answer differently, one rendering it as 'if that was factual, he would have an almost impossible time to pass vetting' [3]. The wording above is from the network's own published transcript [1].
