President-elect Donald Trump may be looking at a chief Boston-based official as a leader of his administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.
Todd Lyons, who led U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations field office for New England and was promoted in October to acting assistant director of field operations for the agency is in consideration as the head of ICE, according to Fox News.
The news organization said its sources have told them that “Lyons appears to be emerging as the favorite to helm the agency” with one source telling them they would be “shocked if Lyons were not nominated as the next ICE director.”
The Herald has independently confirmed through its own sources that Lyons is in consideration for the role.
Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, told 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 said. “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’ office has overseen several high-profile arrests, including the January arrest of the Haitian national Pierre Lucard Emile, who was charged with the rape and sexual battery of a “developmentally disabled person” in September 2023. The particularly “heinous” case was the lynchpin to a U.S. House Judiciary Committee interim report that skewered the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies.
ICE said in a statement following Emile’s arrest that he entered the country through Brownsville, Texas, in December 2022, “where he was deemed inadmissible.” The Department of Homeland Security released him, however, and ordered him to appear before an immigration judge in Boston.
Lyons told a Herald reporter and photographer during an April 2023 ridealong in which his agents arrested several people that the Boston Field Office’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 said. “It’s definitely not someone coming to the United States to make a better life for themselves.”
The Boston field office has struggled with the Massachusetts court system, which regularly does not honor ICE detainers lodged on undocumented criminals. One example is in October, when the office said that Middlesex Superior Court ignored its detainer against Maynor Francisco Hernandez-Rodas, an unlawfully present 38-year-old Guatemalan national, who was charged in that court the month before with the aggravated rape of a child.
But the pushback on federal immigration law enforcement doesn’t end at the court system but climbs straight to the top in the state. Gov. Maura Healey earlier this month said on MSNBC that the Massachusetts State Police will “absolutely not” support Trump’s stated goals of the mass deportations of illegal immigrants. The MSP itself days later stood by its policy that “investigating and enforcing violations of federal immigration law” is not its job.
It’s the experience of navigating such a difficult political environment that will serve Lyons well in Washington, Vaughan told the Herald, where “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 said. “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 could not be reached for comment on Saturday.
This is a developing story.
