ICE boss frosty after Warren debate slam
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s charge that ICE “doesn’t reflect our values” has unfairly “villanized” the immigration-enforcement agency, with false claims about how it operates, ICE’s New England chief said.
“We’re villianized just for doing our jobs,” Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE’s Boston office, said yesterday on Herald columnist Howie Carr’s radio show on WRKO. “There’s a lot of these statements lately. It just spreads more fear that doesn’t need to be there.”
Lyons spoke on Carr’s show a few days after Warren took a heated tone on ICE during her debate Friday night with challenger Geoff Diehl.
“An agency that can’t tell the difference in the risk between a 7-year-old girl, between a woman going in for brain cancer surgery, or a terrorist or a criminal, is an agency that is not working,” Warren said toward the end of the Senate race’s first debate. “It is not making us safer, and it sure doesn’t reflect our values.”
Lyons rejected all of those characterizations, saying the claims about ICE agents arresting kids were especially troubling. While children have been detained in border areas, Lyons said, “No one in my office has ever put handcuffs on a 7-year-old boy or girl.
“Unfortunately that one kind of hit home for all of us,” Lyons said. “I have no idea where the senator got that from.”
Warren’s campaign didn’t respond to a request yesterday for comment.
“I want to see this agency reformed,” Warren said during the debate. She has previously called for ICE to be abolished and replaced with something else.
Warren said, “When ICE right here in Massachusetts goes after people who show up to testify at a trial, when they threaten people so that they won’t report crimes, when women are afraid to report domestic abuse because they are afraid someone in your family or one of their neighbors will be picked up by ICE — that doesn’t make anybody any safer.”
Lyons said that’s “totally reversed” from what his organization does — and he said Massachusetts law-enforcement agencies’ inability to hold people for ICE is actually what hurts victims of domestic violence.
“We’ve had victims reach out to us and say, ‘We thought he was in your custody,’ ” Lyons said.