ICE director hits back at ‘political rhetoric,’ media ‘spin’ for imperiling officers and Americans

Protests and sanctuary jurisdictions are forcing ICE to divert personnel and hindering its ability to reach higher arrest and deportation numbers, acting Director Todd Lyons told The Washington Times as he blamed political rhetoric.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Times, he defended U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s efforts. He scolded sanctuaries run by Democrats for stoking the rhetoric, attacks and mayhem that have besieged his officers.

He also shot down what he said were myths, including that the agency is arresting U.S. citizens and sending agents to round up children at schools.

Accusations of rounding up children are particularly pernicious to Mr. Lyons. He said his agents and officers at schools are trying to locate and rescue some of the hundreds of thousands of migrant children the Biden administration caught and released into the U.S., who were then lost in the system.

Known officially as unaccompanied alien children, they were some of the more troubling cases of the Biden border surge. Roughly half a million were encountered during the Biden years, and most were released to sponsors. The numbers were so overwhelming that the government was pushing children 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 children, and the Biden administration mishandled some 65,000 reports of problems.

The Trump administration vowed to try to locate as many of the children as possible and, if they are 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 “super-sponsors” 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.

He objected to the claims of Chicago area prosecutors that a murder case and other prosecutions were endangered because witnesses and victims feared ICE arrests at the courthouse.

Prosecutors in Cook County told a federal judge last week that witnesses in several cases were reluctant to testify at trial or assist in investigations.

One case involved the wife of a homicide victim, several involved sexual assault victims, and a few 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,” said Assistant State’s Attorney Jose Villarreal, referring to the 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 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.”

If Illinois and other prominent sanctuaries would cooperate by turning over criminal illegal immigrants from prisons and jails, he said, officers wouldn’t have to go into communities to make arrests in the streets.

“You wouldn’t see this,” he said. “You wouldn’t see the violence on the streets.”

Instead, he said, the violence is fueled by anti-ICE rhetoric, with a particular spike in U.S. citizens attempting to hinder 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 the reasons that more U.S. citizens are being prosecuted for obstructing ICE agents are the increase in assaults on ICE agents and federal prosecutors’ willingness to bring those kinds of cases.

Mr. Lyons took over as acting director of the agency in March. At that point, the agency averaged 600 to 700 arrests and deportations daily.

In early June, arrests neared 1,200 daily, powered by an enforcement surge in Los Angeles, before dropping to roughly 900. That record pace would add up to more than 300,000 arrests and more than 450,000 formal removals in a year.

Neither meets the 1 million mark the White House has suggested, 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 protests of ICE are sapping some of his efforts by compelling him to assign officers to force protection.

“One problem we are running into is the fact that with these noncooperative 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.”