Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem doubled down on her demands that California Gov. Gavin Newsom increase cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a press conference on Feb. 12 at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry near San Diego.
ICE has lodged detainers on more than 33,000 criminal illegal immigrants in California’s custody, but the state has released 4,500 of them back onto the streets, Noem said.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons also sent a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, calling on him to honor the detainers. Crimes committed by these illegal aliens include 399 homicides, 3,313 assaults, 3,171 burglaries, 1,011 robberies, 8,380 drug offenses, 1,984 weapons offenses, and 1,293 sexual offenses, according to a DHS statement on Feb. 5.
In an X post on Feb. 6, Noem called on Newsom not to release the more than 33,000 criminal illegal aliens in custody back onto the streets without notifying ICE.
Newsom’s office responded with a statement and an X post saying the state of California works with ICE to deport criminals.
“The federal government hasn’t picked up 100% of the criminals they claim to be going after. California doesn’t block ICE from getting violent criminals,” the governor’s office stated.
Since 2019, the state has coordinated the transfer of more than 12,000 criminal illegal aliens—including murderers, rapists, and other violent offenders—into ICE custody, the governor’s office stated, noting that “federal immigration officials fail to pick up roughly one out of every eight individuals released from California state prisons who already have ICE detainers placed on them.”
On Feb. 12, Noem toured a vault containing 188,218 pounds of seized drugs, including 100,000 pounds of methamphetamine, 59,000 pounds of cocaine, and 7,400 pounds of fentanyl—equivalent to 1.7 billion lethal doses.
She said the inflow of fentanyl has dropped 56 percent under the Trump administration and urged California to work with DHS, ICE, and local law enforcement agencies to keep criminals and illicit drugs off the streets “before they poison more Americans,” citing several parents who have lost children to fentanyl overdoses.
“The cartels traffic, they torture, they behead human beings, and they enrich themselves and profit off of American deaths, and that’s why President Trump took action and designated them as foreign terrorist organizations on day one,” Noem said.
While the Trump administration is stopping “threats from coming into our country,” she said, “we can’t forget about the ones that are already in our borders right now, in prisons and jails across California.”
U.S. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks criticized the Biden administration for its lax border security and “catch-and-release” policies that pulled thousands of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents off the line from ports of entry to process millions of illegal aliens.
Seizures of illicit drugs have increased dramatically because those agents have returned to the ports of entry where they can do more inspections and look for more narcotics, Banks said.
Banks said “not a single illegal alien” has been released into the country in the last nine months of the Trump administration, and that the border is the most secure it’s ever been.
Diane Sabatino, CBP’s executive assistant commissioner, said DHS funding in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—blocked by Senate Democrats in Congress Feb. 12 during budget negotiations—would represent “a generational investment” in border security.
The funding would allow CBP to expand capabilities and, “more importantly,” allow CBP to hire more than 5,000 officers at ports of entry to detect more narcotics and disrupt drug cartels, Sabatino said.
“Our border security mission is national security, and our efforts are never going to stop,” she said.
