Brunswick, Georgia. – The interim director of Immigration and Customs Compliance, Todd Lyons, said that parents in Washington, DC, should not expect to see ICE officers visit schools when children return to school in the capital of the nation on Monday. But he said there may be circumstances when ICE comes on school campuses in the future.
“Day one, you’re not going to see us,” Lyons told NBC News in an interview on Thursday.
But he did not rule out the possibility that the ice needs to come to school campuses in the future in special circumstances. Lyons said ICE officers may need to control students in the district or anywhere in the US. If they were identified as an unaccompanied child when they crossed the southern border.
“We want to use our special agents and our officers to move forward and locate these people. And if [there are] Some have not, and the last known direction was in a school, we just want to make sure the child is sure, “said Lyons.” If we have the opportunity to gather that father with that child, that is what we want to do. “
Lyons also said that there could be a “demanding circumstance” that would require ICE to go to the school campus.
“If it is a demanding circumstance, something violent, yes, we will respond to that,” Lyons said.
At a press conference this week, the mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser, asked the fears of fears that immigration officials stop them.
“I think people who have that concern for themselves and for all who are concerned about them and their security are making adjustments,” Bowser said.
Recently, educators in California have raised concerns about ice activity near schools. The Superintendent of the Unified School District of Los Angeles recently pointed out at a press conference that a 15 -year -old boy was handcuffed by immigration authorities outside the Arleta School in Los Angeles.
A June analysis by a researcher at Stanford University showed that in the midst of the ice activity past spring, there was a 22% increase in absences in the Central Valley of California, an agricultural area that houses many immigrant agricultural workers. The increase was especially pronounced among younger students, according to research.
In March, a group that represents 78 large school districts throughout the country said that the termination of the sensitive ICE location policy, which limited the action of compliance with schools, led to an increase in absenteeism and anxiety among students.
In the NBC interview, Lyons also addressed reports that some US citizens have been recently arrested by ICE agents. Some were arrested for allegedly assaulting ice officers, while others have been arrested in cases of erroneous identity and then released.
“Many of those things you hear about American citizens being arrested, right? That is a training problem in which we are working. But people do not have to worry about walking down the street and that their papers are asked or that their passport is asked,” Lyons said. “When ice chases an individual, it is a specific operation.”
He spoke with NBC News of the Federal Center for Training for Application of the Law, which trains new recruits for 130 government agencies in Brunswick, Georgia.
ICE is under pressure to boost its workforce of deportation officers from 6,500 to 16,500 by the end of the year, after the agency received $ 75 billion from Congress to supercharged deportations of undocumented immigrants. ICE recently signed contracts to support an ICE officers recruitment campaign of $ 40 million and announces $ 50,000 in signature bonds.
Lyons said the agency has received more than 121,000 applications and believes that they can hire 10,000 new agents by the end of the year. The investigation and training of ICE agents previously took up to a year, even in a 13 -week course at the Federal Training Center for the application of the Law, according to former DHS officials.
To accelerate the incorporation process, ICE is shortening that eight -week training by eliminating the repetitive classes and reducing Spanish classes. Training with firearms and classroom instruction have also shortened. Lyons said the new recruits will now take classes six days a week instead of five days a week to condense their training in a shorter period of time.
“We are not going to sacrifice the level of commitment we have with the recruits or the level of educational training they receive,” Lyons said.
