Immigration agents won't be at D.C. schools on first day — but may be going forward, ICE director says

Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons said parents in Washington, D.C. should not expect to see ICE officers visiting schools when kids go back to school in the nation’s capital on Monday.

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons said parents in Washington, D.C., should not expect to see ICE officers visiting schools when kids go back to school in the nation’s capital on Monday. But he said there may be circumstances when ICE comes on school campuses in the future.

“Day one, you’re not going to see us,” Lyons told NBC News in an interview on Thursday.

But he did not rule out the possibility of ICE needing to come on school campuses in the future in special circumstances. Lyons said ICE officers may need to make welfare checks on students in the district or anywhere in the U.S. if they were identified as an unaccompanied child when they crossed the southern border.

“We want to use our special agents and our officers to go ahead and locate these individuals. And if [there are] some we haven’t, and the last known address was at a school, we just want to make sure that child is safe,” Lyons said. “If we have the opportunity to reunite that parent with that child, that’s what we want to do.”

Lyons also said there could be an “exigent circumstance” that would require ICE to go onto a school campus.