BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons said parents in Washington, D.C., should not expect to see ICE officers visiting schools when kids go back to school in the nation’s capital 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 of ICE needing to come on school campuses in the future in special circumstances. Lyons said ICE officers may need to make welfare checks on students in the district or anywhere in the U.S. 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 go ahead and locate these individuals. And if [there are] some we haven’t, and the last known address was at a school, we just want to make sure that child is safe,” Lyons said. “If we have the opportunity to reunite that parent with that child, that’s what we want to do.”
Lyons also said there could be an “exigent circumstance” that would require ICE to go onto a school campus.
“If it’s an exigent circumstance, something violent going on, yeah, we’ll respond to that,” Lyons said.
At a press conference this week, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was asked to address fears by some parents that they could be detained by immigration officials.
“I think people who have that concern for themselves personally and for all of us who are concerned for them and their safety are making adjustments,” Bowser said.
Recently, educators in California have raised concerns about ICE activity near schools. The Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent recently noted at a press conference that a 15-year-old boy was handcuffed by immigration authorities outside Arleta High School in Los Angeles.
A June analysis by a researcher at Stanford University showed that amid ICE activity last spring, there was a 22% increase in absences in California’s Central Valley, an agricultural area that’s home to many immigrant farmworkers. The increase was especially pronounced among the youngest students, according to the research.
In March, a group representing 78 large school districts across the country said the rescission of ICE’s sensitive location policy, which limited enforcement action around schools, was leading to an increase in absenteeism and anxiety among students.
In the NBC interview, Lyons also addressed reports that some U.S. citizens have recently been arrested by ICE agents. Some were arrested for allegedly assaulting ICE officers, while others have been arrested in cases of mistaken identity and later released.
“A lot of that stuff you are hearing about U.S. citizens being arrested, right? That is a training issue that we are working on. But people don’t have to worry about walking down the street and being asked for their papers or being asked for their passport,” Lyons said. “When ICE is going after an individual, it’s a targeted operation.”
He spoke to NBC News from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, 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 supercharge deportations of undocumented immigrants. ICE recently signed contracts to support a $40 million ICE officer recruitment campaign and is advertising $50,000 in signing bonuses.
Lyons said the agency has received over 121,000 applications and he believes they can hire 10,000 new agents by the end of the year. Vetting and training ICE agents previously took up to a year, including at a 13-week course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, according to former DHS officials.
To speed up the onboarding process, ICE is shortening that training to eight weeks by eliminating classes deemed repetitive and cutting back on Spanish classes. Firearms training and classroom instruction has also been shortened. Lyons said new recruits will now take classes six days a week instead of five days a week to condense their training into a shorter time period.
“We’re not going to sacrifice the level of commitment we have to the recruits or the level of education training that they get,” Lyons said.