His work is done: it's back to Southie for beloved ICE czar and beer loving white man Todd Lyons!

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

Last week, we treated you to a look at The Boston Globe's tongue bath profile of a local boy made, in the Globe’s view, good: the Acting Chief of the gang of thugs and losers doing business as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), Southie’s own Todd Lyons. 

Despite his apparent wonderfulness and devotion to duty, this week Todd Lyons decided that he's had enough, using the patently preposterous excuse of his kid's senior year in high school: 

His son will be a high school senior next year, and Lyons said he promised not to miss any football or baseball games.

“It’s time to get back home,” he said. “I’ve really always put family first.” 

And once again his faithful lapdog, The Boston Globe, was there to glaze this cruel, vicious apparatchik.  Grab your hankies, boys and girls:

Those who know Lyons say he is not the fire-breathing partisan one might expect to lead the nation’s most controversial federal agency. He is affable and even-keeled, according to interviews with more than two dozen people who know him, and while a reliable Republican voter, he is not particularly political.

A Boston College High School graduate and Air Force veteran who worked as a police officer in Florida, Lyons previously headed Boston’s field office for ICE, where he at least once personally intervened to prevent deportation.

Speaking of knowing Lyons, once again we quote Justice Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials: “By their fruits we best know them.”  

So to really get to know the pride of Southie (a post formerly held by luminaries like rock-throwing Louise Day Hicks and mobster bro Billy Bulger), let's look back at some of deeds for which Mr. Affable will remembered.  All of which took place in the week before his announcement.

1.  Goons reporting to Family Man Lyons intervened in a family dispute in Alabama by, wait for it, throwing an 86-year old French grandmother into their torture gulag:

Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé was arrested in her nightgown at the home she shared with her late husband, a retired US army captain, in Anniston, Alabama, more than two weeks ago. She had overstayed her 90-day visa, according to the US Department of Homeland Security.

Lyons is known as a good family man

She had moved 4,000 miles from her home in Brittany in north-west France to marry her former sweetheart William “Billy” Ross, whom she had met in the 1950s when she was a secretary working at a military base where he was stationed in France. 

It turns out that the body snatchers had acted at the request of her stepchildren, who were trying to swindle her out of any share of her late husband's estate in violation of state law:

[Alabama state probate] Judge Millwood wrote in her ruling that she believed that Mr. Ross’s younger son, Tony Ross, who she said was a retired Alabama state trooper now working at a federal courthouse in Anniston, had used his position as a government employee to have Ms. Ross-Mahé arrested. 

Don't worry though: after 13 days of terror and life-threatening mistreatment, she was finally booted back to France:

The New York Times reported that Ross-Mahé’s adult children met her at Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris on Friday morning, and that she was still dressed in her detention uniform of orange shoes, sweatpants and a grey sweater covered in stains and holes. One of her sons said she was in a state of shock and exhausted after her ordeal.... 

Before her release from detention, Ross-Mahé’s son said the family had been extremely worried after she was “cuffed by the hands and feet like a dangerous criminal” during her arrest on 1 April, as she suffered from heart and back problems.

He said he, his brother and his sister had heard no news about their mother for a week after she was arrested, until French consular officials were allowed to visit her.

2.  Speaking of Todd Lyons' network of concentration camps,  the detainees (who have been convicted of zero crimes) continue to die from mistreatment and denial of medical care at an appalling rate:

Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt is the 17th Reported ICE Detention Death of 2026 A 27-year-old man from Cuba died on April 12, one day after the 16th death of the year. The pace of detention deaths holds at an average of 1 every 6 days. austinkocher.substack.com/p/aled-damie...

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— Austin Kocher, PhD (@austinkocher.com) April 17, 2026 at 5:43 PM

3.  As with previous instances of mass concentration camps intended to terrify through their cruelty, the living might be envying the dead:

If she's looking for a new gig, ICE is hiring!

In a report published last week, the legal services non-profit Raíces and advocacy group Human Rights First documented “widespread due process violations, inhumane conditions, and lasting physical and psychological harm inflicted on families” incarcerated at Dilley. Nearly 4,000 medical professionals sent a letter to Donald Trump calling for the release of all children held at the facility, writing that detention was causing “predictable, severe, and lasting harm” to their health.

In a statement sent to the Guardian, the DHS denied the poor conditions at Dilley detailed in the report. Detainees said they found hair, worms, bugs and dead flies in their meals. 

Sounds like the cuisine at Todd Lyons's favorite Southie watering holes.

4.  One of the key responsibilities of any leader of an organization is staffing and recruitment?  How'd family man Todd do in that regard?

Rapid recruitment and expansion by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has led to an influx of employees with questionable qualifications, an investigation has found.

The track records of some of the new recruits amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda stand out – and not in a good way.

They include characteristics such as two bankruptcies and six law enforcement jobs in three years, an allegation of lying in a police report to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman – an incident that led to a $75,000 settlement and criticism of the recruit’s integrity – and a job candidate who once failed to graduate from a police academy, then lasted only three weeks in his only job as a police officer.

The common bond is that all were hired recently by ICE during an unprecedented hiring spree – 12,000 new officers and special agents to double its force.... 

Heckuva job, Toddie!

5.  Not only has Todd recruited unqualified goons for his secret police, he's also failed to supervise them to prevent them from committing crimes against those they are supposedly protecting:

6. Speaking of departures, Lyons, when not (or perhaps while)  watching his kids jock it up, has implemented a program of deporting noncitizens previously granted a form of immigration relief (withholding of removal) to violent s***holes where they are mistreated, imprisoned, and tortured in violation of U.S. and international law, according to intrepid freelance journalist Gillian Brockell.

The destinations of these flights include countries like the Congo, as violent and lawless as Southie was in 1975.  Perhaps Todd is too young to remember. 

And this was only one week's worth of torture, crimes, and outrages perpetrated by secret police reporting to the BC High grad who isn't a fire-breathing partisan.   According to the Boston Globe, that is.

Why the Globe has worked so hard to ignore Lyons's record of cruelty, lawlessness, and depravity as ICE Leiter remains a mystery.  The paper has had a long record of overlooking the manifest shortcomings of white men, usually Irish or WASP, it has anointed as saviors, like Kevin White or Bill “Happy Hour” Weld. 

But the ludicrous effort to whitewash Lyons as Dad and/or Martyr of the Year doesn't pass the laugh, or perhaps the scream, test:

Lyons told the Globe he was proud to have been a voice for the tens of thousands of people working under him at the agency.

“I would much rather me be the villain and be demonized than the work the men and women of ICE did and do every day,” Lyons said.  

And the Globe would apparently rather burn its reputation and integrity than grapple with the evil that white men from Southie do. 

We can only hope that a reconstituted Department of Justice will someday be less gullible and forgiving.