Acting ICE director says agency will 'ramp up' raids if sanctuary jurisdictions don't cooperate

EXCLUSIVE: Todd Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said his agency will “ramp” up raids in sanctuary cities if they refuse to cooperate with his agents. 

Todd Lyons sounded off on the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda and a range of other issues, saying ICE agents were going to go after criminal illegal immigrants regardless of sanctuary policies. 

“The more they’re going to double down or triple down, we’re going to ramp it up more,” he told Fox News. “We want to work with you, but if you don’t want to work with the federal government, if you don’t want to work with ICE, then we’re going to make sure that we’re doing all we can do to bring our law enforcement resources to that jurisdiction. And we’re going to take care of those public safety threats.

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“If you don’t want to work with us, we’re going to handle the problem,” he added. 

Lyons, however, did praise California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who recently said his state will work with ICE. 

A sanctuary state, California generally doesn’t cooperate with immigration authorities, but Newsom said it would be willing to work with the agency to honor detainer requests. That followed outrage over a Fox News story about an illegal immigrant convicted of vehicular manslaughter who will be released from prison July 19, over six years before his full sentence is up.

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“I really applaud the governor for that,” Lyons said. “When people see exactly the individual that ICE is dealing with, how could you not work with ICE in a case like that?

“We actually saw the details behind this case,” he added. “It’s a commonsense approach to work with ICE to get these public safety threats out of here.”

In the first 100 days of the Trump administration, ICE has arrested more than 6,000 illegal immigrants, the agency said this week. The agency is going to continue to “remove the worst of the worst,” Lyons said. 

“How can anyone argue with you when you’re deporting violent gang members, sex offenders and fentanyl traffickers,” he said. “ICE is out there protecting communities, taking these public safety threats away from our neighborhoods, protecting our children.”

As Congress ponders giving ICE funding for 10,000 agents, Lyons said the additional money would be a “game changer.” 

“I’ll give you an example. When we did the operation in Boston, we had targeted enforcement when we knew these criminal aliens that had been released from jails, from courts, from sanctuary jurisdictions where detainees weren’t honored,” he said. “But while the teams were out there conducting this operation, in real time, more criminal aliens were being released.”