President Biden should have begun cracking down on illegal border crossings much earlier in his administration, the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has acknowledged.
Patrick “P.J.” Lechleitner told NBC News in an interview published Thursday that “career people” in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “would have liked” Biden to move quicker against the migrant crisis that dogged his four years in office.
On June 4, with the 82-year-old Biden in the midst of an uphill re-election fight, he issued an executive order shutting down the southern frontier if illegal crossings topped 2,500 per day for seven consecutive days.
“Quite frankly, I don’t know if anybody in DHS wouldn’t have wanted that earlier,” said Lechleitner, who has been the acting head of ICE since July 2023.
Biden kicked off his presidency in January 2021 by rolling back a raft of hardline Trump-era immigration policies and ushering in an explosion of migration from Central and South America across the US-Mexico border.
In November 2024, five months after Biden issued the order, the number of migrant encounters by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at the southwest border plunged below 100,000 in a month for the first time in the 46th president’s tenure.
Critics, including allies of President-elect Donald Trump, have pointed to the policy change as proof that Biden could have dramatically mitigated the border crisis much earlier on.
As it happened, however, Lechleitner told NBC News that ICE had to divert staff to help CBP handle the surge, leaving the enforcement agency without the ability “to do our own core mission adequately.”
“We’re burning hot,” he told the outlet. “We’re at maximum resource capacity. At this point, we’re going to need more money and resources to increase, and with more money and resources, we can increase detention, we can increase removal operations.”
Throughout fiscal year 2024, which ended Sept. 30 of last year, ICE deported just over 47,000 illegal immigrants. Lechleitner contends that his agency did all it could given the strain on resources.
Lechleitner also expressed frustration that Biden administration officials restricted him and other agency officials from communicating more with the public about their work.
“They should [have] allowed us more opportunity to explain what we’re doing and explain the hard work that ICE is doing and CBP is doing,” he argued.
“Let us talk. Let us demystify. Because, if not, people are going to just make their own stories up about what’s going on, and it’s going to be more problematic.”
At one point, White House officials told the agency to step holding monthly news conferences that had originally been promised.
“I don’t know exactly why they stopped,” Lechleitner told NBC News, “but you know, we were only allowed to do so much.”
Lechleitner also raged against “sanctuary” policies, in which states and cities decline to cooperate with the feds in enforcing immigration law.
“It drives me nuts when our local and state partners, you know, won’t cooperate with us on some of these immigration issues,” the acting director vented. “Why can’t we just cooperate and just do this to protect the American public?’”
Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, has threatened to slash funding for sanctuary cities and battle blue states that attempt to get in his way.
The incoming administration also intends to embark on a mass deportation campaign and border security is one of the president-elect’s top legislative priorities.
