Retiring ICE chief says Biden should have acted 'earlier' to address migrant surge
President Biden's acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief called out the administration for its delay in taking action on the border crisis, saying he wished the president would have implemented executive actions earlier as the migrant surge spun out of control.
Acting ICE Director Patrick "PJ" Lechleitner, who spent more than 20 years with the Department of Homeland Security, joined "FOX & Friends" to discuss his take on Biden's delayed border action, the challenges the agency faced under his leadership and the hurdles agents will continue to face under Donald Trump.
"I run the agency, execute. I enforce, but I don't know why they didn't do that earlier," he said. "I know it was in process for a long time. I would have liked to [have] seen it earlier. I think it helped a lot. It did really help our mission, but I wanted to see that earlier."
Biden announced long-awaited executive border actions in June 2024 to stop illegal immigrants at the southern border claiming asylum if crossings reach a certain level.
The presidential proclamation temporarily suspended the entry of non-citizens across the southern border once the number of average border encounters exceeded 2,500 a day over seven days, officials said.
That stayed in effect until 14 days after there had been a seven-day average of less than 1,500 encounters along the border. Officials argued it would make it easier for immigration officers to quickly remove individuals who do not have a legal basis to remain in the United States.
Even so, illegal immigrant encounters reached historic proportions under the Biden administration, reaching 10.7 million according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.
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The number of terror watchlist encounters also surged to a whopping 3,500% under Biden's leadership, in contrast to Trump's.
Lechleitner, who is set to retire from his post on Friday, argued that because the surge in illegal immigration has reached record levels, it stifled the agency's ability to perform its "core mission" since resources have been re-allocated to the border.
"We've been drawn out of our core mission to help CBP. We're going to help all the time when we do that at the border," he said.
"We also get pulled to help Secret Service. We've had thousands of agents pulled from HSI to help Secret Service. We have to because it's a national security priority, but Secret Service needs more money. Give them more money [to] do their job the right way, give more money to the border so that CBP can actually do their job and lock that down a little better, but don't keep pulling us off our core mission sets, which is the interior enforcement for these fugitive operations teams."
"We have almost 8 million people on the non-detained docket now that we have to go find," he continued. "It's a big challenge and our people are capable."
Lechleitner, who has reiterated the non-partisan nature of the law enforcement agency, sounded the alarm on the "vilification" of agents, who are simply in place to enforce laws already on the books.
"The new administration is not even in yet, and there's already vandalism at some of our offices," Lechleitner said. "They're spraying… abolish ICE again and all this nonsense. We're just doing our job. It's [a] vilification of public servants, first responders, and my heart goes out to the first responders who are in L.A. right now"
"It's preposterous that people vilify these first responders that are taking their life in their own hands here, going out and supporting the communities, and… people just disregard that and they… demonize us and vilify us," he continued.
Lechleitner urged any citizens who don't like the current policy to talk to their elected lawmakers.
Fox News' Adam Shaw contributed to this report.