Trump Goon Left Flailing by Simple On-Air Question

President Donald Trump’s border czar was left stammering after he was asked about a high-stakes investigation into ICE-related killings.

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Tom Homan, 64, blanked on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday after anchor Dana Bash pressed him on the status of the probe into the ICE agents who allegedly killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.

Homan seemed stumped and took a beat before responding.

“I don’t know specifically,” he said. “I haven’t been involved with the investigations, but it’d be policy that they’d be put on administrative leave during the shooting investigation. That’s the policy of the agency.”

Bash pointed out, however, that the shootings fall squarely into Homan’s domain. As border czar, Homan oversees the enforcement of the Trump administration’s heavy-handed immigration blitz, which has so far led to the killings of at least 10 people.

“Okay. But, but you don’t—as borders are involved in this, you don’t know for sure if they have been?” Bash asked again.

Homan passed the buck to acting ICE director David Venturella instead.

“No, you know, ICE has an acting director, Dave Venturella, and they report to Markwayne Mullin, the secretary,” he said, referring to the Homeland Security secretary, before continuing to stammer through his response.

“I, I, uh, you know, I’ve said from day one, I won’t comment on [the] investigation,” he said. “But I can tell you, you know, I haven’t specifically tracked these cases, but I can tell you per policy, they’re usually put on administrative leave pending the investigation, pending, you know, sworn statements, internal affairs interviews, and, and, you know, the entire investigation, they, they usually will not be put back on duty until the investigation’s over and either been cleared, or if they got problems, then they may not go back at all.”

Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant, was fatally shot by ICE agents while on his way to work on July 7. ICE originally claimed that it was conducting targeted immigration enforcement, but it was later reported that Salgado Araujo was not the target of the operation.

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More than a week after the incident, Homan admitted to CBS News that he hadn’t seen videos of the tragic shooting, which showed that the ICE agents did not have emergency lights on. Salgado Araujo’s family said he thought he was being robbed because the agents were in an unmarked car. He also had no idea they were law enforcement.

“I have not seen the videos, but I am saying our vehicles are equipped with emergency lights. Now, if they didn’t activate the lights — again, I haven’t seen that video — if they didn’t activate their lights, then there’s an issue there,” Homan said.

“But I’m saying they are equipped with lights. So let me just caveat that, they should have been equipped with lights and sirens,” he went on. “But I do not know specifically if they activated those lights.”

Guerrero, 26, was killed in front of his three-year-old daughter on July 13. The ICE agent accused of his shooting, David Michael Brouillette, later admitted to his ex-wife that he shot Guerrero.

“He was asking me to lie for him and to cover for his character,” Ashley Brouillette told The Portland Press Herald. “I told him that I was not going to lie for him. And then he tried to say that it was a justified shooting because the guy tried to hit him with his car.”

Ashley also said she had gone to David’s superiors with concerns about his mental health. David is a U.S. Army veteran who had been receiving disability from the Department of Veterans Affairs, court records show.