By Ted Hesson and Mimi Dwyer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden will nominate a Texas sheriff who criticized Trump-era immigration raids to lead the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, a homeland security official told Reuters on Tuesday.
Biden will tap Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a veteran law enforcement officer and Democrat who has served since 2017 as sheriff of the most populous county in Texas, the official said.
In a July 2019 Facebook post, Gonzalez said he opposed sweeping immigration raids after former President Donald Trump, a Republican, a month earlier tweeted hyperbolically that ICE would begin deporting “millions of illegal aliens”.
“I do not support ICE raids that threaten to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom do not represent a threat to the U.S.,” Gonzalez wrote. “The focus should always be on clear & immediate safety threats.”
The nomination would need to be approved by the 100-seat U.S. Senate, divided 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, with Vice President Kamala Harris able to break ties.
Biden, a Democrat, campaigned on a pledge to reverse many of Trump’s hardline immigration policies. After Biden took office on Jan. 20, his administration placed a 100-day pause on many deportations and greatly limited who can be arrested and deported by ICE.
Biden’s deportation moratorium drew fierce pushback from Republicans and was blocked by a federal judge in Texas days after it went into effect.
Some career ICE officials have privately criticized the new enforcement priorities, saying they prevent agents from arresting some criminals.
Biden announced on April 12 that he would tap Chris Magnus, an Arizona police chief, to lead U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Magnus had criticized the Trump administration’s attempt to force so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions to cooperate with federal law enforcement.
Gonzalez similarly sought to limit ties between local police and federal immigration enforcement. In 2017, he ended Harris County’s participation in a program that increased cooperation between county law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington and Mimi Dwyer in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Steve Holland in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin, Cynthia Osterman and Peter Graff)
