Todd Lyons said that federal agents will prioritize finding, arresting, and deporting ’the worst of the worst.’
The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signaled a crackdown on companies that hire illegal immigrants and said agents will arrest anyone in the country illegally, regardless of whether they have a criminal record.
ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons told CBS News in an interview on Sunday that the Trump administration would persist in immigration enforcement at worksites, adding that there is no executive mandate that bans those actions.
ICE operations, he said, would be based on criminal warrants against companies that are believed to be hiring illegal immigrants, noting that in some cases, companies are relying on child labor and engaging in human trafficking. Such actions are not victimless crimes, he said.
“Not only are we focused on those individuals that are working here illegally, we’re focused on these American companies that are actually exploiting these laborers, these people that came here for a better life,” he said.
Lyons added that federal agents will prioritize finding, arresting, and deporting “the worst of the worst,” such as illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes. However, he said that ICE agents will target any illegal immigrants regardless of whether they have convictions or not.
While he said he would “rather focus all of our limited resources on that to take them into custody,” ICE has to “go out into the community and make those arrests, and that’s where you are seeing [that] increase” in arrests, referring to individuals who are arrested but were not the original target of ICE’s operations.
Should ICE agents find someone who “is here in the country illegally, we will take them into custody,” Lyons said in the interview, which was his first televised one since he became acting director in March.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump said he would make the large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants a priority. Both he and Vice President JD Vance have argued that mass illegal immigration into the United States would lead to long-term, serious consequences.
