Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the agency’s new leadership on Sunday, responsible for immigration law enforcement, and she also promised to conduct lie detector tests on employees to identify those who may leak information about operations to the media.
In addition, Norm also confirmed that the government will further expand immigration detention operations to the military after reports of using the huge fortress Bliss Army Base near the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas.
“Yes, there is a plan to use the facility in Brisburg for detention,” she said.
The secretary also warned that her department would be able to use out funds “only weeks” to mass deportation unless Congress received funds.
“My authorities under the Department of Homeland Security are broad and extensive, and I plan to use each of them to make sure we comply with the law, we are following procedures to keep people safe and make sure we make sure we follow what President Trump has promised,” Noem told National CBS.
Although these polygraph tests are usually not permitted in court, federal law enforcement agencies often use them and provide national security clearance.
White House officials have previously been frustrated by the pace of deportation, partly blamed on the recent leak revealing the city where authorities planned to raid.
Despite the department’s publicity over the attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the invitation to accompanying agents was invited to journalists, and also witnessed flights of deportation and the facts about ICE, as well as the facts they used and the reasons they used to arrest, detention and deport certain affected facts.
Todd Lyons, former assistant director of field operations for the agency’s law enforcement division, will serve as acting ICE director. Madison Sheahan, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, was appointed deputy director of the agency when he served as governor of South Dakota.
According to Reuters, the leadership change occurred after ICE’s acting director Caleb Vitello was reassigned on February 21 for not meeting anti-immigration expectations. On February 11, the other two top immigration law enforcement officers were reassigned.
During the president’s first month’s return to the office, the Trump administration expelled 37,660 people, with DHS data first reported last month showing an average of 57,000 people evacuated from the U.S. in the last year of the Joe Biden administration.
An analysis of the guardian showed that in the first few weeks of the Trump administration, arrest rates were higher than usual, but arrests and detentions did not always translate into evacuation, while, the number of people at the unauthorized U.S.-Mexico border has dropped sharply since last summer, first with new biden restrictions and now with new biden restrictions.
Norm said Friday that the agency plans to sue two “information leakers.”
The two men “are leaking our planned enforcement actions and will leak vulnerabilities that have been conducted and exposed in several cities,” she said on Sunday. She said they could face it for 10 years in federal prison. A Department of Homeland Security spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reuters and AP contributed the report
