Lyons made the remark during an exclusive interview with CBS News, in which she also asserted that the agency would take tough action against employers who hire undocumented immigrants.
Lyons said that her agency would prioritize its “limited resources” to arresting and deporting “the worst of the worst,” referring to those with serious criminal records, while those without authorization to live in the country would also be detained during the operations.
“What frustrates me, once again, is that we’d love to focus on these foreign criminals who are in jail,” Lyons said on the Face the Nation program, with Margaret Brennan.
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“A local or state law enforcement agency has already deemed that person a threat to public safety, arrested them and is holding them,” she said. “I would prefer to focus all of our limited resources on that to detain them, but we have to go out into the community and make those arrests, and that’s where you see the rise of the so-called ‘collateral’ arrests,” Lyons added, referring to people who are not the original targets of the operations, but who nonetheless are in the United States illegally.
If ICE agents encounter someone “in this country illegally, we will detain them,” Lyons warned.
She argued that “it’s possible” to reach the government’s goal of one million deportations per year with the new tens of billions of dollars in funding Congress provided to bolster this campaign.
According to official data obtained by CBS, ICE had deported 150,000 people in the first six months of the Trump administration.
