President-elect Donald Trump could also be taking a look at a chief Boston-based official as a pacesetter of his administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.
Todd Lyons, who led U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Elimination Operations subject workplace for New England and was promoted in October to performing assistant director of subject operations for the company is in consideration as the top of ICE, in response to Fox Information.
The information group stated its sources have informed them that “Lyons appears to be emerging as the favorite to helm the agency” with one supply telling them they’d be “shocked if Lyons were not nominated as the next ICE director.”
The Herald has independently confirmed by way of its personal sources that Lyons is in consideration for the function.
Jessica Vaughan, the director of coverage on the Middle for Immigration Research, informed the Herald that “Todd Lyons is an excellent choice for ICE director, if that’s how it turns out.”
“He has experience in different parts of the county, he has shown determination and skill in dealing with the difficult politics of immigration enforcement in Massachusetts including a judicially imposed sanctuary law and individual judges who are hostile to immigration enforcement,” she stated. “He has navigated it with skill and tenacity and his experience in Massachusetts in particular will be valuable in navigating the politics of immigration enforcement in Washington.”
Lyons’ workplace has overseen a number of high-profile arrests, together with the January arrest of the Haitian nationwide Pierre Lucard Emile, who was charged with the rape and sexual battery of a “developmentally disabled person” in September 2023. The significantly “heinous” case was the lynchpin to a U.S. Home Judiciary Committee interim report that skewered the Biden-Harris administration’s border insurance policies.
ICE stated in a press release following Emile’s arrest that he entered the nation by way of Brownsville, Texas, in December 2022, “where he was deemed inadmissible.” The Division of Homeland Safety launched him, nevertheless, and ordered him to look earlier than an immigration choose in Boston.
Lyons informed a Herald reporter and photographer throughout an April 2023 ridealong through which his brokers arrested a number of those that the Boston Discipline Workplace’s “limited resources” allowed them “to really focus on the worst of the worst.”
“It’s really hard for anybody, I think, to argue why we took an enforcement action on a non-citizen when you see a lot of the criminal histories and the rap sheets on these folks,” he stated. “It’s definitely not someone coming to the United States to make a better life for themselves.”
The Boston subject workplace has struggled with the Massachusetts court docket system, which frequently doesn’t honor ICE detainers lodged on undocumented criminals. One instance is in October, when the workplace stated that Middlesex Superior Courtroom ignored its detainer towards Maynor Francisco Hernandez-Rodas, an unlawfully current 38-year-old Guatemalan nationwide, who was charged in that court docket the month earlier than with the aggravated rape of a kid.
However the pushback on federal immigration legislation enforcement doesn’t finish on the court docket system however climbs straight to the highest within the state. Gov. Maura Healey earlier this month stated on MSNBC that the Massachusetts State Police will “absolutely not” help Trump’s said targets of the mass deportations of unlawful immigrants. The MSP itself days later stood by its coverage that “investigating and enforcing violations of federal immigration law” is not its job.
It’s the expertise of navigating such a troublesome political setting that can serve Lyons properly in Washington, Vaughan informed the Herald, the place “ICE officers and administrators have been told to sit on their hands for four years.”
“The most difficult challenges to immigration enforcement in Massachusetts are the ideologically driven judges and politicians who try to thwart immigration enforcement as much as possible,” Vaughan stated. “In Washington, the challenge is going to take leadership to bring ICE officers and agents under the mindset that they have been working under for the last four years and recapturing the creativity and motivation to do the job well.”
Lyons couldn’t be reached for touch upon Saturday.
Herald Government Editor Joe Dwinell contributed to this report.
It is a creating story.
Todd Lyons, Discipline Workplace Director for ICE Enforcement and Elimination Operations in Boston heads along with his workforce to arrest a goal in Chelsea final yr. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)
