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Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons vowed to “flood” Boston with agents after Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu doubled down on her pledge to uphold the city’s sanctuary policies and resist the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Speaking on the local radio program “The Howie Carr Show,” Lyons responded to Wu by saying, “Now you’re going to see more ICE agents come to Boston to make sure that we take these public safety threats out that she wants to let go back into the communities.”
He pointed to the Trump administration’s “Operation Patriot,” which surged federal agents in the Boston area in March and yielded over a thousand arrests.
“We are going to keep doing it in Boston,” he said. “We’re going to continue to do our mission. We’re going to keep making Boston safe as she’s failing to do with these sanctuary city policies.”
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Pressed on whether ICE will surge agents to the Boston area, similar to how agents are currently in Washington, D.C., Lyons responded, “100 percent you will see a larger ICE presence.”
“We’re definitely going to, as you’ve heard the saying, flood the zone, especially in sanctuary jurisdictions,” he went on. “And obviously Boston and Massachusetts decided that they wanted to stay sanctuaries and sanctuary does not mean safer streets it means more criminal aliens out and about in neighborhoods.”
Lyons pointed out that during Operation Patriot, ICE pursued “targeted enforcement operations” of criminal aliens released by the city of Boston and Massachusetts.
Operation Patriot resulted in the arrest of nearly 1,500 illegal immigrants, including murderers, rapists, drug traffickers and child sex predators.
Sources at ICE told Fox News that 790 of those arrested had criminal convictions or charges, and 277 had final removal or deportation orders. The sources said that all the targeted criminals were roaming the streets of Massachusetts cities freely before being apprehended.
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The operation ran throughout May and involved ICE teams from other states in the Northeast, as well as authorities from the FBI, DEA, and ATF.
Speaking on Wednesday, Lyons said, “There’s so many of these criminal aliens that keep getting released to go out and commit more crimes that local law enforcement have to deal with and we can take that, you know, violent criminal illegal alien instantly out of the neighborhood.”
This follows U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi setting a deadline of Tuesday for sanctuary jurisdictions to drop their policies that block cooperation with federal authorities.
Speaking on Fox Business, Bondi said she sent letters to 32 mayors and seven governors, “telling them you better comply or you’re next.”
Bondi highlighted a letter she sent to California Gov. Gavin Newsom in which she warned that “individuals operating under the color of law, using their official position to obstruct federal immigration enforcement efforts and facilitating or inducing illegal immigration may be subject to criminal charges.”
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The letter, shared on social media, said cooperation between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, including on immigration enforcement, “is vital to enforce federal law and protect national security.”
Wu publicly rejected Bondi’s demands during a press conference, calling the ultimatum a political stunt.
“Stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures. Unlike the Trump administration, Boston follows the law,” Wu said Tuesday. “This is our city. This is our country, and I’m so proud and grateful to show the world who our community is here in Boston and what we’re made of.”
In response to Lyons’ comments, Wu’s office shared a statement from the mayor who was answering another reporter’s question. Wu reiterated, “In Boston, we comply and follow all of the laws, city, state and federal. And we will not back down from communities that have made us the safest major city in the country.
“This is a beautiful, diverse, incredible city and I have said it now very directly this administration needs to stop attacking cities to hide their own failures,” she added.
Fox News Digital’s Charles Creitz and Madison Colombo contributed to this report.
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