The sanctuary city movement in Massachusetts is helping one sector of the immigrant community — sex offenders and fentanyl dealers, the region’s top ICE official said.
“Elected officials preaching their sanctuary city status are making it easier for those who commit sex crimes and fentanyl dealers,” said Todd Lyons, who led U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ICE/ERO) field office for New England and was promoted in October to acting assistant director of field operations for the agency.
“They are the ones victimizing the immigrant community,” he told the Herald Monday.
Lyons said the incoming Trump administration will be “hard-charging” when it comes to deporting illegal immigrant criminals, but the enforcement still starts on the local level.
With Boston, Somerville and all the other sanctuary cities vowing to thwart ICE, the bad guys will know where to relocate.
“We need cities and towns to work with us to keep these criminals out of neighborhoods,” Lyons added. “We focus on the worst of the worst and all the political rhetoric is not helping.”
Gov. Maura Healey, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne, and other communities including Amherst, Cambridge, Concord, Lawrence, Newton, Northampton and possibly soon Natick all adhere to sanctuary city rules that handcuff local police from assisting ICE agents in deporting suspects here illegally.
“These are bad people we’re talking about,” Lyons stressed, “and we need local law enforcement to work with us to keep everyone safe.”
That includes citizens and ICE officers who must track down illegal immigrant offenders once they have been set free after being arrested for whatever crime they’re accused of locally. That just injects more risk into “removal operations,” as ICE/ERO undertakes.
“We have elected officials who are fearmongering,” Lyons said. “They don’t take the time to understand we are a viable public safety partner.”
He said ICE doesn’t have the resources needed to focus on the rapists and drug dealers they know are in Massachusetts illegally. Almost daily, Lyons added, they must make the frustrating decision to go after someone facing deportation for a sex crime or drug trafficking.
“All these officials are doing is welcoming criminals to the state. They are doing their own communities a disservice,” Lyons said. “All we are asking for is to make an arrest of someone already arrested.”
In that “controlled environment,” everyone is safer.
Lyons was one of the candidates named to lead ICE in the new administration under Tom Homan, who had already been named “Border Czar” by President-elect Donald Trump.
