Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), pushed back on criticism that federal agents are "harassing" communities during enforcement operations, arguing that ICE personnel are forced into communities by sanctuary jurisdictions that routinely release offenders.
Lyons asserted that ICE officers are "doing targeted enforcement on these individuals that were actually released after a law enforcement agency deemed them a public safety threat."
"So that's the key part that's being left out, is the fact that these individuals have already been convicted of a crime or have pending charges, and a local law enforcement or state law enforcement agency deemed it necessary to put that individual in jail," Lyons said on "The Faulkner Focus" on Wednesday.
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Lyons said the political decisions of sanctuary cities directly force ICE personnel into riskier environments, leading to heightened confrontations and increased violence against officers. He cited a 1,150% increase in assaults and an 8,000% surge in death threats against ICE agents.
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He emphasized that ICE prefers to make arrests in "secure settings" rather than put officers and immigrants at risk and "deal with these agitators who are fueled by the political rhetoric that's out there right now."
"Sanctuary jurisdictions are the ones that keep re-releasing public safety threats back into the community, which means ICE and other federal partners have to go into the communities to take these public safety threats out," he said.
Statistics posted on ICE's website show that 50.8% of people it arrested in fiscal year 2024 had criminal convictions, while 20.8% had pending criminal charges. In 2023, those numbers were 31.5% and 11.8%, respectively, and in 2022 they were 25.4% and 7.1%. The remaining arrests are labeled as "other immigration violators."
Lyons' comments follow Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker's Facebook post criticizing ICE. The governor wrote, "This isn't enforcement. This is harassment," above an article about ICE in Chicago.
Lyons rejected this claim, insisting that ICE has always had a presence in Chicago. "To hear that we're going in and harassing places is 100% false," he said.
