Tom Homan took aim Monday at a scene in the medical drama The Pitt that showed ICE agents inside a hospital, saying he had watched a TV show last week that depicted officers coming into an emergency room and arresting someone who was getting ready for surgery. Homan, speaking to ’s Laura Ingraham, said ICE has never made an arrest inside a hospital or a church.
“I’ve been on the Hill negotiating the DHS shutdown. They don’t want to reform ICE, they want to shut it down,” Homan said, adding that “the whole left is misinforming the American people” about what ICE and Border Patrol do. He said the scene crossed a line because “we’ve never made an arrest inside of a hospital. We’ve never made an arrest inside of a church.”
The dispute landed on a show with a very specific episode in mind: the 11th episode of The Pitt, titled “5 P.M.” In that installment, ICE officers bring in a detainee named Pranita after she falls during an immigration raid on a restaurant. She is fast-tracked for an X-ray, the episode says she does not have a fracture and would not need surgery, and the agents take her away before she can be given a sling. When nurse Jesse tries to stop them, he is tackled to the floor and detained.
Series producer John Wells said on The Town with Matt Belloni that the production tried to be careful with its portrayal of ICE. “We’re not trying to politicize it. We’re simply trying to put forward what sometimes are uncomfortable truths, but are truths nonetheless,” Wells said. “We’re just trying to be truthful,” he added. “And if we can be truthful, it’s not left or right, it’s just our telling of what’s factually happening without trying to take a side.”
An ICE spokesperson separately told the Daily Beast that the agency does not conduct enforcement at hospitals, would only enter one if there were an active danger to public safety, and sends officers with detainees for medical care to protect staff and public safety. The spokesperson also said ICE does not conduct immigration enforcement in churches, though it could make an arrest there in a narrow public-safety scenario, such as if a dangerous illegal alien felon fled into a church or a child sex offender was working as an employee.
The argument is not occurring in a vacuum. Last July, federal immigration officers arrested Denis Guillen-Solis inside the Ontario Advanced Surgical Center in Ontario, California, and two healthcare workers were later indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of impeding and assaulting law enforcement officers in connection with that arrest.
Homan’s complaint may have been aimed at a television scene, but the broader fight is over whether viewers are seeing exaggeration or a version of a real-world practice that still has the power to inflame. For now, the answer to the question at the center of the uproar is no: there is no verified basis here for a third season announcement of The Pitt, only a controversy over one episode and the politics wrapped around it.