Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) got a hard grilling on MS NOW’s “Katy Tur Reports” on Friday after he backed a Homeland Security funding bill that boosts funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement by another $10 billion despite mounting controversy over their tactics and abuses of basic constitutional rights.
“Why does ICE need more money?” asked Tur.
“This really wouldn’t be an issue if we didn’t have a calamity over the last four years,” said Lawler, who represents a competitive upstate district. “You saw during Joe Biden’s presidency, over 10 million people flood across our borders. We saw how it overwhelmed our cities and our social safety net … The big challenge here, though, is that you have sanctuary cities and states that refuse to cooperate with federal officials when it comes to immigration enforcement. And so they prevent local law enforcement from cooperating. They prevent local law enforcement from being involved in these investigations. And so ICE needs more agents to be able to effectively do its job.”
“Just to interrupt for a second,” said Tur. “We’ve seen ICE agents like, for instance, in Minnesota, there was like six or seven ICE agents going into the home of a guy who was an American citizen and dragging him out in his underwear. Why do you need six or seven ICE agents to go into the wrong home and take a guy out in his underwear?”
“Look, that — obviously that example is a unfortunate situation, but you look at the fact that you had 675,000 people deported last year, over 70 percent of them had a criminal record,” said Lawler. “And you have people who have had deportation orders against them going back 20, 30 years that are still in the United States … Obviously, you have the situation with the 5-year-old boy, that should not happen.”
“There’s the 5-year-old boy, there’s the guy in his underwear, there’s Renee Nicole Good, shot three times, once on the right side of her temple,” said Tur. “I mean, you can argue about whether, you know, the guy was acting, really did fear for his life in the moment, but it doesn’t. The video does not look good.”
Furthermore, she noted that current polls are sharply turning against ICE tactics. “So as a Republican who’s running for his seat again, how do you promise them, ‘hey, listen, we’re going to get this done, but we’re not going to be — we’re not going to be terrible about it. We’re not going to be cruel. We’re not going to be mean about it. We’re not going to, I’m not okay with what you’re seeing on TV either.’”
Lawler then claimed — falsely — that the video unambiguously showed Good hitting the officer with her car, and added that, while he supports a pathway to citizenship for non-criminal unauthorized immigrants, “When you look at those that have been deported, the 675,000 over the last year, over 70% of them had a criminal record.”
“Congressman … there’s dispute about it,” said Tur. “I mean, the Cato Institute says that 73 percent had no conviction, the ones that were deported. The New York Times has less than 30 percent arrested between January 20th and October 2025, had a criminal record.”
Additionally, Tur continued, it’s hard to trust the White House’s basic claims on this when they lie incessantly about the smallest things, including this week’s incident where they put out a digitally-altered image of an arrested church protester. “This is the White House putting out AI generated images that are not memes, that are just manipulated without saying that they’re manipulated. How do you trust the White House when they’re not being truthful like this?”
“Well, I have not seen that image, and certainly that should not be done from the standpoint of, you know, putting something out,” said Lawler. “It should be the exact image. But what I would say to you is this, we have seen obviously on both sides, people want to highlight the story that fits their narrative.”
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