President Biden’s acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) called out the administration for its delay in taking action on the border crisis, saying he wished the president had taken executive action sooner as the migrant surge emerged from the hand ran.
Acting ICE Director Patrick “PJ” Lechleitner, who spent more than two decades at the Department of Homeland Security, joined “FOX & Friends” to discuss his thoughts 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, run it. “I enforce it, but I don’t know why they didn’t do it before,” he said. “I know it’s been going on for a long time. I would have liked to have seen it sooner. I think it helped a lot. It really helped our mission, but I wanted to see that sooner.”
Biden announced long-awaited executive border actions in June 2024 to prevent illegal immigrants from seeking asylum at the southern border if overages reach a certain level.
The presidential proclamation temporarily suspended the entry of noncitizens across the southern border once the number of average border encounters exceeded 2,500 per day for seven days, officials said.
Border Patrol picks up a group of asylum seekers from a relief camp on the U.S.-Mexico border near Sasabe, Arizona, U.S. on Wednesday, March 13, 2024. During the first four months of fiscal year 2024, Border Patrol registered more than 250,000 asylum seekers. The number of migrant arrests in Arizona’s Tucson sector, the most of any region the agency patrols, according to federal government statistics, CBS reports. Photographer: Justin Hamel/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Justin Hamel/Getty Images)
That remained in place for a fortnight after an average of fewer than 1,500 encounters along the border for seven days. Officials argued that this would make it easier for immigration officials to quickly remove individuals who have no legal basis to remain in the United States.
Still, encounters with illegal immigrants under the Biden administration reached historic proportions, reaching 10.7 million, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.
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Encounters with terror watchlists also rose to a whopping 3,500% under Biden’s leadership, in contrast to Trump’s.
Lechleitner, who is set to retire Friday, argued that because the increase in illegal immigration has reached record levels, the agency’s ability to carry out its “core mission” is being hampered as resources have been reallocated to the border .
“We have been taken away from our core mission to assist CBP. We will help all the time if we do that at the border,” he said.
‘We are also drawn to help the Secret Service. We’ve pulled thousands of HSI agents to help the Secret Service. We have to because it’s a national security priority, but the Secret Service needs more money. Give them more money (to do). do their job the right way, give more money to the border so that CBP can actually do their job and close that out a little better, but don’t continue to distract us from our core missions, which is the domestic enforcement of these fugitive operations teams.”
Trump’s new border czar Thomas Homan speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington DC, Monday, July 8, 2024. (DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
“We have almost 8 million people on the list who are not incarcerated now that we have to go find them,” he continued. “It is a big challenge and our people are capable.”
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Lechleitner, who has reiterated the impartial nature of the law enforcement agency, sounded the alarm about the “slander” of officers, who are simply on the scene to enforce laws already on the books.
“The new government has not even been installed yet and there is already vandalism at some of our offices,” Lechleitner said. “They’re spraying… get rid of ICE again and all this nonsense. We’re just doing our job. It’s (a) defaming public servants, first responders, and my heart goes out to the first responders that are in LA right now”
“It’s ridiculous that people are vilifying these first responders who are here taking their lives into their own hands and going out and supporting the communities, and… people just ignore that and they… demonize us and vilify us,” he continued.
Lechleitner called on all citizens who don’t like the current policy to talk to their elected lawmakers.
Fox News’ Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
