OAN Staff James Meyers
9:05 AM – Thursday, January 9, 2025
President Joe Biden’s acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief called out the administration, saying it should have taken action sooner on the ongoing border crisis, claiming he wished Biden would have put in place executive actions earlier before the border got out of control.
P.J. Lechleitner, who became acting director in July 2023 and is preparing to leave the job this week before the new administration brings in its own appointee, said that the number of incoming illegal migrants meant his agency had to give staff to help Customs and Border Protection, leaving ICE unable “to do our own core mission adequately.”
“I run the agency, execute. I enforce, but I don’t know why they didn’t do that earlier,” Lechleitner told Fox News. “I know it was in process for a long time. I would have liked to [have] seen it earlier. I think it helped a lot. It did really help our mission, but I wanted to see that earlier.”
Biden announced long-awaited executive border actions in June 2024 to stop illegal immigrants at the southern border claiming asylum if crossings reach a certain level.
The actions temporarily suspended the entry of non-citizens across the southern border once the number of average border encounters exceeded 2,500 a day over seven days, officials said.
That stayed in effect until 14 days after there had been a seven-day average of less than 1,500 encounters along the border. At the time, officials argued it would make it easier for immigration officers to quickly remove individuals who do not have a legal basis to remain in the United States.
However, illegal immigrant encounters hit record-highs under the Biden administration, reaching 10.7 million according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.
The number of terror watchlist encounters also surged to a staggering 3,500% under Biden’s leadership, in contrast to Trump’s.
Lechleitner, who is set to retire from his post on Friday, made the remarks that resources were taken away from his department due to the record-level of crossings by illegal immigrants.
“We’ve been drawn out of our core mission to help CBP. We’re going to help all the time when we do that at the border,” he said.
“We also get pulled to help Secret Service. We’ve had thousands of agents pulled from HSI to help Secret Service. We have to because it’s a national security priority, but Secret Service needs more money. Give them more money [to] do their job the right way, give more money to the border so that CBP can actually do their job and lock that down a little better, but don’t keep pulling us off our core mission sets, which is the interior enforcement for these fugitive operations teams.”
“We have almost 8 million people on the non-detained docket now that we have to go find,” he continued. “It’s a big challenge and our people are capable.”
Lechleitner also stated that law enforcement and first responders face hatred from people and are just simply trying to do their jobs.
“The new administration is not even in yet, and there’s already vandalism at some of our offices,” Lechleitner said. “They’re spraying… abolish ICE again and all this nonsense. We’re just doing our job. It’s [a] vilification of public servants, first responders, and my heart goes out to the first responders who are in L.A. right now”
“It’s preposterous that people vilify these first responders that are taking their life in their own hands here, going out and supporting the communities, and… people just disregard that and they… demonize us and vilify us,” he continued.
Additionally, the outgoing ICE chief said if Americans don’t like the current policy they should take it up with their elected lawmakers.
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