But he's from Southie: The Globe whitewashes cruel ICE czar

By Immigration Correspondent Emma Goldman with
Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

Last Sunday, The Boston Globe treated, if that’s the word, its readers to a warm, glowing profile of a local boy made, in the Globe’s view, good: the current Acting Chief of the U.S. bureau of body snatchers, known in court papers as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), Southie’s own Todd Lyons.

As described by the Globe, he sounds like a nice fella:

Affable and even-keeled, a self-described “football and baseball dad,” Lyons supervises an army of armed agents and officers who have shattered car windows, dragged immigrants from vehicles, and killed a US citizen, leaving terror in their wake.

Those who know Lyons say he is not the fire-breathing partisan one might expect to be leading the nation’s most controversial federal agency. Rather, in more than two dozen interviews, people from across the political spectrum portrayed him as respectful, cordial, and occasionally funny — the consummate professional.... “He’s a really nice guy,” said Simona Flores-Lund, Lyons’s former boss in ICE’s Dallas office. “Don’t judge him because of the job he does.”

How else would you judge someone? We asked Justice Robert Jackson for comment, and he said simply:  “By their fruits we best know them.”  

Nuremberg Opening Statement at  ❡❡190.

Southie has given us many fine regular guys.

Lyons is what fellow Bostonians might call “a regular guy”: unpretentious and easy to get along with, someone who likes to play golf, watch the Patriots, and have a beer.

He has salt and pepper hair, which he wears slicked back over a broad face, and he speaks firmly and directly. He comes off more relaxed during interviews with conservative podcast hosts than with mainstream journalists. He is personable, if guarded, and known to crack a joke....

A regular guy from Southie who enjoys a brewski, like Dapper O’Neill and the other goons who threw rocks at school buses 50 years ago.

Lyons...now trumpets the hard-edged policy of the second Trump administration. “We are being allowed to do our job,” he told the Globe.

“People just can’t believe, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been here eight to 10 years, now you’re arresting me,’” Lyons said on a podcast last year. “Well, yeah, you’re here illegally, right?”

You might also be locked up in some ICE hellhole even though you have pending claims for immigration relief, like the hundreds of thousands Lyons’s body snatchers have incarcerated despite long-pending applications for asylum or status by marriage.

Lyons justifies his cruelty with a story, not verified by the Globe or anyone else about a junkie cousin whose death Lyons blames not on the junkie but on his dealer, who Lyons claims was an immigrant (there being no U.S. citizens involved in drug trafficking):

The work of ICE also became more personal for Lyons, family members said, after a cousin he was close to died in 2019 of a fentanyl overdose. ... “I think he always felt a sense of ... he wished he could have done more,” Jack Lyons said. “So his way now is, he goes after that: fentanyl dealers, drug dealers. … That probably fed a little bit into some of the border stuff too, keeping drugs from coming over.”

In a podcast interview last year, Lyons suggested the drugs that killed his cousin came from a dealer in Lawrence, an undocumented immigrant who Lyons claimed was free because local police did not honor a custody request from ICE. Such ICE requests that are ignored by so-called sanctuary cities are a major bone of partisan contention — and an enormous point of frustration for Lyons.

In fact, to the extent anything in this story is true, the reason the Lawrence Police did not hold someone in the absence of sufficient state criminal charges is because the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that local police agencies did not have the power to jail people just because ICE asks them to. Lunn v. Commonwealth, 477 Mass. 517 (2017). You could look it up. As could Lyons or the Globe reporters.

The Globe was proud enough of its story to plug it in their immigration newsletter:

We wanted to know: How did this “regular guy” go from humble Southie, where he dreamed of becoming a Boston cop or firefighter, to leading a major federal agency and one of the president’s top issues?

Maybe that’s what these reporters want to know. We wanted to know how they could present Todd Lyons as a wonderful family man devoted to justice without considering that the agency he runs has perpetrated the following atrocities against human beings in just the last few weeks:

1.  Beer-lovin' Todd runs a vast gulag of detention centers marked by incompetence, cruelty, torture.  And death.

This year alone, deaths in ICE detention are running at the rate of one per week.  Many if not all of these deaths are to the failure of ICE contractors to provide even basic health care and Lyons' depraved indifference to this unconstitutional denial of care to civil detainees:

Septic shock?  Bet that really would cut into your ability to enjoy knocking back bevos with your Southie boyos. 

The full story was published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

2.  If the gruesome ICE concentration camps don't kill you, you may will wish you were dead, which is obviously the point of this illegal punitive incarceration:

“What we saw tonight inside the facility was shocking,” [Rep.] Stanton told reporters outside the Mesa facility after the brief tour, calling the conditions inside “significantly overcrowded.”

He described concrete rooms with no bedding or blankets, packed with people mostly laying on the floor. When the lawmakers entered the facility, many of those individuals also scrambled to the doors of the holding cells, asking them for help.

[Rep.] Ansari was visibly shaken by what she saw.

“Shameful, absolutely shameful that the United States government, funded by our taxpayer dollars, is allowing this to happen,” she said.

Ansari said that each of the rooms holding immigrant detainees lists its maximum capacity; the majority had a capacity of 21, while two others were 24. Ansari, Stanton and Grijalva all said they counted more than 40 people in each of the 6 rooms and estimated around 250 people in total were inside the facility.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this in my entire life,” [Sen.] Grijalva said, fighting back tears. The Tucson Democrat described the way people were laying down inside as “like sardines.”

“It is frightening in there,” Grijalva said. “It is disgusting.”  

Bet the tormented detainees are relieved to know that their jailer is respectful, cordial, and occasionally funny. 

3. The pride of Southie is the boss of the body snatchers who arrested the wife of a U.S. Army Sergeant who was eligible for status by marriage.  She would had DACA status had the regime not lost her application.  

4.  The regular guy's untrained heavily armed goons have in the past two weeks shot and seriously wounded two more people.  Although Southie's beloved football dad was quoted making a number of smears about the victim, he provided no evidence to back up his assertions.  Available video appears to show that the man, shot six times in the face, had not tried to hit ICE secret police with his car, which makes this attempted murder.   

5. And to echo the request of every white man at a Southie bar, here's one more for the road.

 

 

We could go on listing criminal conduct by Lyons' untrained body snatchers, but you get the drift.

What lessons can we take from the sordid truth about fine family man Todd Lyons?

First as our old friend Kurt Vonnegut kept telling us, you are who you pretend to be.

We also know that when you feel besieged and beset, like Lyons, the human response is anger and defensiveness. This response is likely to be heightened when you know that the criticisms are well-founded and the crimes committed by the agency you run are serious. You may also try to justify your continued service on the grounds that you are better than your likely replacement, although Lyons’ record at running his agency calls that into question.

Charming family man, seen here at Nuremberg

What would a worse job look like? Throwing detainees into the Black Hole of Calcutta? Impaling them on hot metal stakes (the Mad King’s dream)?

When you are responsible for a criminal secret police that has committed thousands of crimes and sent thousands more to torturous concentration camps, do we really care how sincere and charming you are?

We recently saw a movie about another charming government official described by his psychiatrist thusly:

“There were people and things that he liked—his family, his friends and animals, and for them, nothing was too good. On the other hand, he had a complete and total disinterest in any living thing which did not fall into one of these groups.”  

The title of the movie was Nuremberg.

You may ask: why are we getting so exercised about a newspaper story recounting the banal details of a government official’s life? 

Our friend Hannah Arendt answered that one in 1963.  You can read it here.