Former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Thomas Homan on Saturday responded to Netflix star Michelle Wolf after the comedian compared the agency to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in a parody video.
Homan told Fox News host Neil Cavuto that Wolf’s video inaccurately portrayed ICE, citing law enforcement statistics from the agency’s past year of operations.
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“We’ve saved several thousands of children from drug traffickers,” Homan said. “We have arrested over 2,000 child predators who trafficked in children for sexual exploitation.”
“What ICE officers have done in this past year is arrest more than 100,000 criminals walking the streets of our country,” he continued. “We’ve seized 981,000 pounds of narcotics in the neighborhoods of this country. What ICE is doing is protecting this country and keeping us safe.”
Homan’s remarks come after Wolf’s show “The Break” tweeted a parody video in which Wolf, dressed as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, explains that “no organization is better than ICE is,” while guns are fired in the air and she lists positions similar to those held by the extremist group.
“It’s popular nowadays to say ICE is bad, but there is no better representation of American values right now than what ICE is,” Wolf adds in the video.
Some Democrats have joined calls from left-leaning activists to abolish ICE, the federal government’s primary agency for enforcing immigration policy.
Calls to abolish the agency, which was established during the Bush administration, have yet to pick up traction among the Democratic Party’s leadership, but have become a top target of President Trump and the White House as the administration seeks to paint Democrats as weak on the issue of illegal immigration.
Wolf previously hosted the White House correspondents’ dinner earlier this year, causing controversy when some supporters of the president accused Wolf of attacking press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s appearance.