(DCNF)—Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Todd Lyons tore into Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett on Fox News Monday after she compared the agency to “slave patrols.”
Crockett compared ICE to “slave patrols” during a radio interview Friday.
In an appearance on “The Will Cain Show,” Lyons said Crockett’s rhetoric puts lives at risk.
“It is disgusting, and I really hate to even give any satisfaction to that, but that is the rhetoric that is getting my officers and agents hurt every day,” Lyons told Will Cain. “Assaults up more than 100%. We just had an officer have to use their weapon for somebody trying to hurt them and kill them with a vehicle.”
Lyons reminded critics that American law enforcement predates ICE by centuries.
“Policing isn’t born out of slave patrol. The first federal agency was the U.S. Marshals Service created in 1789, and it wasn’t for that. We’ve had police departments going all the way back to ancient Greece. So history shows that it’s not about slave patrols, and ICE isn’t out there just rounding up people indiscriminately. They still have to have probable cause, reasonable suspicions. We follow the law,” Lyons said.
Lyons blasted comparisons of ICE agents to Nazis as dangerous and dishonest.
“When I say to any elected official that wants to say we’re Nazis and Gestapos, we are enacting the law just the way Congress wrote it. So if they don’t like it, change the law. But the men and women of ICE are gonna do their law enforcement mission. And it’s a shame that people wanna call us Nazis, Gestapos, because that’s not what the men and women signed up for,” Lyons added. “That’s not what they’re doing. But we’ve seen from this week, the horrific events of this week, what could happen when there’s rhetoric like this, and it has to stop. It’s just truly disgusting how they’re paying the men and women of ICE.”
Crockett claimed on “The Katie Phang Show” in March that “it is not a criminal violation to enter the country illegally … it’s not a crime,” a statement that White House border czar Tom Homan later rejected on Fox Business’ “Varney & Co.”
The Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to lift restrictions on immigration raids in Los Angeles. The administration asked the justices in August to block a district court order that barred agents from considering race, location, type of work, or speaking Spanish when making stops, arguing the judge should not “micromanage” enforcement in a region where one in 10 residents is an illegal alien.
ICE is carrying out operations in Massachusetts and Chicago, after previously conducting large-scale crackdowns in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
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