EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s ICE Chief Slams Liberal Judges For Creating Deportation ‘Roadblocks’ Based On Personal ‘Opinions’

HOUSTON—President Donald Trump’s chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement slammed liberal judges stymying the agency’s mass deportation effort by creating “roadblocks” based on their personal “opinions” in a recent interview with The Daily Wire.

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons called efforts to block key immigration policies “super frustrating” and acknowledged that they negatively affect arrest and deportation operations targeting criminal illegal immigrants roaming the country.

“Every day it seems like we have some type of adverse decision that’s going to affect how we’re doing our job,” Lyons said.

“What we’re seeing is a lot of [the] time when judges opine with their own opinions on it, they’re going against how Congress wrote the law. And sometimes we have congressional leaders who are barking at what we’re doing or complaining about it,” Lyons added. “Well, they have the power to change it.”

“All ICE is doing is enforcing the law the way it’s written and the way Congress laid it out,” he said. “So, I think that’s the biggest frustration for us, not only is it these roadblocks impeding how we’re doing our law enforcement mission, it’s the fact that it’s just roadblocks based on someone’s opinion that they don’t like what ICE is doing.”

Credit: Photo by Andrew Leyden/Getty Images.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, the younger brother of former liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, recently blocked Trump from using the approximately 300 National Guard soldiers left in Los Angeles from “engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants, unless and until Defendants satisfy the requirements of a valid constitutional or statutory exception.”

The Supreme Court also recently overturned a separate attempt by a U.S. District Court judge’s order barring immigration agents from conducting “roving patrols” in the City of Angels.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an Obama appointee, ruled in August that the Trump administration can’t deport accused MS-13 gangbanger Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda for the time being after charging him with human smuggling.

Xinis previously ordered the Trump administration to “take all available steps to facilitate the return” of Abrego Garcia after he was deported to El Salvador in March despite an “administrative error.”

Credit: Photo by Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Trump administration officials have set a goal to deport 1 million illegal immigrants each year. By the end of August, ICE had deported more than 332,000 illegal immigrants, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

While the latest number outpaces the previous fiscal year, when 271,000 illegal immigrants were deported, the current pace of deportations falls short of the president’s ambitious goal.

Lyons, however, said he’s confident that ICE will reach that number with the agency’s street operations, combined with its push for illegal immigrants to self-deport.

The Trump administration has offered to pay for commercial flights for those seeking to leave the country on their own, in addition to handing them a $1,000 “exit bonus.”

“I think we’re going to see our number, definitely with the CBP Home app and those that decided to leave on their own,” Lyons said.

Lyons, who said he plans to retire in “a year or two,” also shared his vision for success at the conclusion of the Trump administration’s historic deportation campaign.

“At the end of it, if we’ve done our best to eradicate MS-13, if we’ve had a significant impact on the fentanyl problem that’s affected almost every state, if we were able to locate and find all the unaccompanied children, if we were able to really show all the public safety threats were removed, to me that’s success, to me that shows that ICE did its law enforcement mission it was meant to do.”