BOSTON—The Daily Wire joined U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons and his agents in Greater Boston as they hunted down criminal illegal aliens.

The operation comes as President Donald Trump marks his first 100 days in office, and Border Czar Tom Homan vows to “go to Boston and bring hell with me” in an effort to arrest illegal aliens who have sexually assaulted children.

“We did more arrests in these 100 days than the previous administration did last year,” Lyons told The Daily Wire in his first interview.

Lyons became the acting director of ICE in March after five years as Boston Field Office Director. He said morale is at an all-time high following the Trump administration giving the support needed to remove illegal aliens.

ICE is focused on deporting the “worst of the worst” that the Biden administration ignored, like violent criminal illegal aliens or those who have been deported before.

“It’s the worst crime in the world when you sexually assault a child,” Homan said in a White House press briefing on Monday. “That’s why I made a statement that one time I was going to go to Boston and bring hell with me.”

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During the ride-along on Friday, ICE arrested 55-year-old Miguel Angel Chavez, who was convicted on two counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14 and deported in 2013. Chavez, a citizen of El Salvador, illegally re-entered the United States at an unknown place and time following his first deportation.

The second arrestee during the mission was 69-year-old Jose Lazaro Ayala, who illegally entered the country undetected and was convicted in September of leaving the scene of an accident involving an injured person or death. Ayala is pending removal to El Salvador, according to ICE.

“These aren’t the people you want in your neighborhood,” Lyons said. “These arrests right here show what we’ve done these first 100 days and what Secretary Noem and President Trump have been really pushing for: that ICE gets the worst of the worst.”

ICE was unable to target three other criminal illegal aliens in the mission, possibly because poor weather kept them from going to their outdoor jobs.

Miguel Angel Chavez and Jose Lazaro Ayala were arrested in the Greater Boston area on Friday for being criminal illegal aliens. (Yisroel Tietelbaum)

The Daily Wire witnessed firsthand the challenges ICE is facing in sanctuary jurisdictions during the ride-along. According to Lyons, migrants are attracted to places like Massachusetts because of its generous social service benefits. Numerous sanctuary cities make deportations more difficult by often refusing to cooperate with ICE.

“One of the big difficulties operating in our sanctuary jurisdiction is that these are actual public safety threats,” he said. “A jail, a police department, a sheriff’s department, and state police have deemed these individuals a public safety threat and locked them up. Yet instead of working with the federal government, they decide to release them back on the street.”

Lyons said that in sanctuary jurisdictions, agents have to work harder to surveil targets and gather information about them to plan arrests.

“For these two today, anywhere between 40 to 80 hours could have been put in just on surveillance in research into these crimes, because, number one, there are ghosts,” he said.

“The state doesn’t provide us driver’s license data, registration data. So really, the men and women of ICE have to go and create these cases on their own and then get out there and do surveillance and try to get court and police records.”

Daily Wire reporter Kassy Akiva interviewed the new Acting Director of ICE, Todd Lyons, in his first on-video interview in his new role. (Yisroel Teitelbaum)

By not working with ICE, sanctuary cities increase the number of deportations, according to Lyons. Instead of simply picking up criminal illegal aliens at jails, ICE is forced to track them down at their workplaces or in their neighborhoods. This often results in other illegal aliens — violent criminals or not — being arrested as well.

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Lyons credited ICE’s recent success to Trump’s whole-of-government approach, which pairs ICE with agents from other federal agencies, including the FBI, DEA, IRS, Diplomatic Security Service, and others.

“With no doubt, ICE is helping the president establish his goals and his pledges that he made during the campaign, which was to get the worst of the worst outside of our communities, and I think this first hundred days have been a great success,” Lyons said.