Anti-ICE protests and sanctuary jurisdictions are taking their toll, forcing the agency to divert its personnel and hindering its ability to reach higher arrest and deportation numbers, acting Director Todd Lyons told The Washington Times, putting the blame on political rhetoric.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Times, he defended U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s efforts and scolded sanctuaries run by Democrats for stoking the rhetoric, attacks and mayhem that have besieged his officers.
He also shot down many myths he said have grown around the agency, including that it’s arresting U.S. citizens and sending agents to round up children at schools.
That latter one is particularly pernicious to Mr. Lyons, who said his agents and officers showing up at schools are actually trying to locate and rescue some of the hundreds of thousands of migrant kids the Biden administration caught and released into the U.S. and then lost track of.
Known officially as unaccompanied alien children, or UACs, the kids were one of the more troubling parts of the Biden border surge. Roughly half a million were encountered during the Biden years, and most of those were released to sponsors. But the numbers were so overwhelming that the government was pushing kids out the door without much vetting, leading to some dangerous and heartbreaking situations.
An inspector general said the government had lost track of roughly 300,000, and the Biden administration mishandled some 65,000 reports of problems.
The new administration vowed to try to locate as many of them as possible and, if they’re not with their sponsors, try to reunite them with their families, Mr. Lyons said. As of July, it had located 13,000.
“Yet we’re being accused of ’Oh, you’re going to schools and rounding up children,’” Mr. Lyons said. “All we’re trying to do is locate these poor kids. And that’s the last known address we have. Yet you have some media outlets or some elected officials that will put that spin on it, that this great mission that we’re trying to do to locate and find and help these poor children is being torn apart in the news or for political rhetoric.”
He said they had cases of what they called “super-sponsors,” who claimed 30 or 40 children from the government.
“And then you go there, and that address is a 7-Eleven or it just doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “So then you have to wonder, where do these children go?”
Mr. Lyons also rebuffed claims that his agency is snaring — or, in some of the more overheated rhetoric, “kidnapping” — U.S. citizens.
“That’s not the case. ICE, when we go out and make an arrest, we know exactly who we’re going for. It’s intelligence-driven, target-based,” he said.
And he refuted the claims of local prosecutors in the Chicago area who claimed they were seeing a murder case and other prosecutions endangered because witnesses and victims feared being nabbed by ICE at the courthouse.
Prosecutors in Cook County told a federal judge last week that they had several cases where witnesses were reluctant to testify at trial or otherwise assist in investigations.
One case involved the wife of a homicide victim, while several involved sexual assault victims and a handful were domestic violence cases.
“Their fear of arrest makes it more likely that her husband’s murderers will go free and justice will be denied,” Assistant State’s Attorney Jose Villareal said, referring to the first case involving the homicide victim’s wife.
Mr. Lyons said blame should go to sanctuary politicians who are selling a distorted look at what ICE is actually doing.
“Only that rhetoric is what’s stoking that fear,” he said. “There’s no proven evidence that ICE will go out and arrest the victim. That just won’t happen.”
He also said that if Illinois and other prominent sanctuaries would cooperate by turning criminal illegal immigrants over from within their prisons and jails, he wouldn’t have to send officers into their streets to nab people.
“You wouldn’t see this,” he said. “You wouldn’t see the violence on the streets.”
Instead, he said, the anti-ICE rhetoric is fueling the violence, with a particular spike in U.S. citizens attempting to hinder ICE arrests.
“You wouldn’t go out to the metro police department here in Washington, D.C., and just randomly interfere in a traffic stop. You’d be arrested,” he said. “But here you have people actively showing up, to assault, ram their vehicles into ICE agents and officers — who weren’t even involved in that situation.
He said more U.S. citizens are being prosecuted for obstructing ICE agents than before due to both the increase in assaults on ICE agents and an increased willingness by federal prosecutors to bring those kinds of cases.
Mr. Lyons took over as the acting director of the agency in March. At that point, the agency was averaging between 600 and 700 arrests and deportations a day.
In early June, arrests neared 1,200 a day, powered by an enforcement surge in Los Angeles, before dropping to roughly 900 a day. That’s still a record pace that would mean more than 300,000 in a whole year, and the pace of formal removals would top 450,000 a year.
But neither meets the one million mark the White House has suggested it wanted to see, despite a massive surge of help from other federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and Border Patrol.
Mr. Lyons said sanctuary cities and constant anti-ICE protests are sapping some of his efforts by forcing him to assign people to force protection.
“One problem we are running into is the fact that with these non-cooperative jurisdictions and the fact that we have so many officers and agents being attacked, we have to increase the amount of people we send out,” he said. “Not necessarily to make arrests but to make sure those officers and agents that are out there are being safe.”
“That’s definitely something that hampers our mission. It’s not going to deter us, but that’s one definite factor in our day-to-day operations is that now a law enforcement agency has to provide law enforcement to make sure the law enforcement officers are safe,” he said.
Mr. Lyons said he — and President Trump — also look at self-deportations, which he said are in “the millions.”
