ICE Rebrands Crime Unit to Win Over Sanctuary Cities

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has rebranded its department for criminal investigations so sanctuary cities will be more inclined to cooperate, according to ICE’s acting director.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which pursues migrants and gangs involved in such illegal acts as sex trafficking and child pornography, has a new internet home under DHS.gov, The Washington Times reported.

The move was necessitated by sanctuary cities, which in refusing to assist federal deportation officials and investigators, rejected emails from ICE.gov addresses, acting director Patrick J. Lechleitner said.

“What we can control within the department is rebranding so people can actually know what we are doing,” Lechleitner told The Times.

“So that’s kind of where the HSI branding came from: It’s allowing HSI to get their message out there and to do their jobs in a more meaningful way with jurisdictions that quite frankly are more reticent to deal with them.”

Lechleitner added that he also has restructured HSI task forces and issued guidance to further separate the agency from deportation authorities.

“If you think about it, the Marine Corps is part of the Navy … But it’s the Marine Corps. They know exactly what the Marine Corps does versus what the Navy does, traditionally. That’s exactly the idea for HSI,” he told The Times.

The country’s top 10 sanctuary cities include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Jose, Columbus (Ohio), San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Each city is led by a Democrat mayor.

Jon Feere, who served as chief of staff at ICE during the Trump administration, questioned whether the HSI rebrand would work.

“Of course, the Biden administration is as anti-ICE and lawless as the sanctuaries, so there’s really no hope without a change in administration,” Feere, now director of investigations at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Times. “In the meantime, these efforts just make ICE look weak and do nothing to unite DHS.”

Lechleitner also told the outlet he wants Congress to fund 50,000 detention beds for ICE. That is more than the 41,500 Congress allocated 41,500 for fiscal 2024 and President Joe Biden requested 34,000 in his fiscal 2025 budget.

The extra beds would help ICE to the big safety and security threats among the migrant population.

“I would love that to be a little higher, you know, so that we would have more bandwidth to handle the surges so we could detain more appropriately. It would take some of the stress off our facilities,” Lechleitner told The Times.