Trump’s immigration officials don’t want to talk about the cruelty

“I’m not going to speak about personnel actions,” acting ICE director Todd Lyons said in response to a question from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) about whether ICE agents have been fired for misconduct during his leadership. 

“I welcome the opportunity to speak to the family in private, but I’m not going to comment on any active investigation,” Lyons said again, this time to a question about whether the immigration chief was willing to apologize to Renée Good’s family for the Trump administration calling her actions “domestic terrorism.”

Later in Rep. Swalwell’s questioning, Lyons refused to say whether he agreed with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s justification of Good’s killing on the same grounds.

This was the theme of more than three hours of testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday, as Lyons and two other top immigration officials, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott and Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph Edlow, largely deflected questions on accountability and killings by ICE officers.

But they were not quite as laconic on other issues. The officials responded effusively to praise for their work in what they and some Congress members—including committee chair Rep. Andrew Garbino (R-N.Y.)—characterized as prioritizing “the safety of law enforcement and the communities they serve and protect.”

The officials maintained that ICE agents were under attack in communities like Minnesota’s Twin Cities, claiming without evidence that “paid agitators” were actively trying to stop enforcement. Federal agents have been heavily armed during attacks, arrests, and removal of residents, while protesters have been overwhelmingly peaceful.

As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote in October, ICE agents are objectively not in danger: Reviewing ICE’s own data, he found that none of its agents have been killed by an immigrant in its more than two-decade history. The overwhelmingly leading cause of death was Covid-19, followed by cancers linked to the September 11 attacks.

And as Garrett Graff, an expert on the history of problems and corruption within ICE and CBP, wrote in a post republished by Mother Jones, “America cannot survive as a free society if ICE and CBP continue to operate as they have over the last year—let alone as both agencies are turbocharged and empowered with even more funding, more officers, more guns, and more arrests.” For Graff, this means Congress must halt funding.

The other topic Trump’s immigration officials appeared eager to talk about on Tuesday was body cameras. “One thing I’m committed to is full transparency, and I fully welcome body cameras all across the spectrum and all of our law enforcement activities,” Lyons said. “Body camera footage will be released.”

Lyons said previously during the Tuesday hearing that about 3,000 officers out of 13,000 wear cameras. Scott said roughly half of CBP’s 20,000 agents wear cameras. 

But body cameras do not guarantee transparency. As my colleague Rachel de Leon wrote last week, additional body cameras do not mean public release, oversight, or accountability around the footage. (The Center for Investigative Reporting has filed a complaint in federal court calling for ICE and CBP to produce videos and other records from Chicago and Los Angeles raids filmed by videographers likely contracted by the DHS.)

In other words, the Trump administration’s promise of “transparency” is unlikely to mean accountability.