By Phil Fairbanks
Published Sun, Jan 1, 2017

Long before Donald Trump and his much-ballyhooed wall at the Mexican border, Michael T. Phillips toiled on the front lines of immigration enforcement.

He started as a 22-year-old inspector on the Peace Bridge and, over the next three decades, rose through the ranks to become one of the most important, and largely unknown, faces of the post-9/11 security effort here.

It was a journey that eventually put the Kenmore native in charge of one of the region’s largest jails and often gave him the final word on whether undocumented immigrants were deported or allowed to stay.

As field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in cross-border Buffalo, Phillips saw firsthand the changes in immigration enforcement after 9/11 and how it has become the polarizing, hot-button issue it is today.

“Every day, we make our community safer,” he said recently when asked about the spotlight on immigration. “The public doesn’t always see that, but I see it every day.”

After nearly 30 years with ICE and its predecessor agency, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Phillips retired at the end of the year to pursue other opportunities, including a possible career in consulting.

In a rare interview, the SUNY Buffalo State graduate and son of a state trooper, one of 10 kids, talked about his mission and the motivation that came from protecting his hometown.

He also talked about the difficult decisions he made in his role as the final arbiter for many undocumented immigrants hoping to stay here. Even after an immigration judge rules, an individual could appeal to Phillips, who was a kind of court of last resort.

“Sometimes, there’s compelling human reasons not to deport someone,” he said. “The public doesn’t see that. They don’t see the compassion that goes into those decisions.”

At 52, Phillips leaves ICE at a time when many people inside and outside the agency expect its mission and direction to change dramatically.

In a Trump administration, there’s an expectation that ICE will ratchet up the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants, especially those with criminal records.

During the campaign, Trump promised to hire more ICE agents, end sanctuary cities and abolish the current catch-and-release practices used in many immigration cases. He also called for the construction of a wall between Mexico and the United States, and promised to take a hard line against Muslims seeking to enter the country.

"What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” Trump said on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in November.

Phillips is reluctant to talk about Trump, in large part because no one at ICE is certain what the president-elect will do once he’s in office. He does, however, expect the people he is leaving behind to follow the new president’s lead just as they did when President Obama arrived on the scene eight years ago.

“I see the great work our folks do everyday,” he said. “Whatever changes come, we’ll be 100 percent supportive. New administrations come in with new policies, and we always respond. We’ll do it this time, too, and we’ll do it well.”

Despite the spotlight on immigration enforcement, Philips was a low-profile public figure. It also helped that the prison he ran, the 650-bed Federal Detention Center in Batavia, has been free of any major scandal, unlike many other local jails.

He credits the federal government’s strict detention standards, the facility’s 24-hour medical care and a workforce that he calls the “most talented” in the nation.

“It comes down to the people,” Phillips said of the 200 or so ICE employees he oversaw. “They care about what they do. There’s also something about the work ethic here.”

During his three decades with ICE, Phillips saw his agency’s mission change dramatically. There was a time when his job was to identify undocumented immigrants ending their local or state jail sentences and ensure they left the country.

“And then 9/11 happened,” he said. “And everything changed.”

What was the INS then became ICE and, as an arm of the newly created Department of Homeland Security, an agency with a whole new mission – national security.

Fifteen years later, the Buffalo office is charged with finding and detaining anyone who is deemed a threat to the nation. Phillips' turf was almost all of upstate New York.

With the enhanced responsibility has come a larger public spotlight on ICE.

In 2014, Phillips found himself at the center of a deportation case involving Ben Sangari, a British citizen and native of Iran who overstayed his visa waiver.

Sangari, a businessman and philanthropist with ties to Bill Clinton and Colin Powell, was picked up during a routine traffic stop in Amherst, held at the detention center and eventually deported by Phillips.

ICE called the case “a priority under the agency’s current enforcement strategy.”

Sangari’s lawyer suggested the decision was heavy-handed and compared it to whipping a 4-year-old with a switch for failing to clean up his toys.

Phillips wouldn’t comment on the public’s perception of ICE but, after talking with him, you get the sense he is well aware of the criticism and doesn’t think it’s fair.

“We just carry out our mission,” he says. “Because it’s such a politically controversial issue, there are always going to be people who speak out against what we’re doing and people who speak in favor of what we’re doing.”

For Phillips, ICE’s work, and the significance of what it does, is better reflected in the story he always tells when people ask him about the memorable cases.

It was 2007 and Phillips was part of an ICE team investigating fugitives when it came across a Cleveland-area woman being stalked and abused by a former boyfriend.

“She was literally shaking when she talked to us, she was so afraid of this guy,” Phillips said. “We dropped everything we were doing.”

Phillips said the boyfriend, an undocumented immigrant, was found, prosecuted and deported. Even now, nearly a decade later, he remembers the victim and the satisfaction of being able to tell her he was gone and she was safe.

In the world of immigration enforcement, Phillips is well regarded and it’s no secret his superiors wanted him to stay on.

“Mike Phillips dedicated three decades of his life to serving others,” said Thomas Homan, executive associate director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations. “Seeing him leave our ranks is a bittersweet moment because, while his retirement is richly deserved, his vast knowledge and extensive experience will be sorely missed.”

Phillips’ departure, which coincides with Trump’s arrival, comes at a crossroads for ICE.

Everyone expects there will be changes in the months ahead. How big they are is less clear. But one thing is certain. For the first time in 30 years, Mike Phillips will be watching from the outside.

http://buffalonews.com/2017/01/01/30...icial-retires/