Top Trump administration officials are unhappy with arrest and deportation numbers and have lambasted the federal immigration officials responsible for the operation, the Washington Examiner learned.
Three current and former federal immigration officials detailed a recent heated exchange between White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and dozens of senior U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Washington in late May.
At a time when collaboration is necessary to undertake President Donald Trump’s mass deportation goals, trust has eroded as some high-ranking employees feel they are being closely monitored by the White House over how they are carrying out arrest operations of illegal immigrants.
“They’ve been threatened, told they’re watching their emails and texts and Signals,” the first official said. “That’s what is horrible about things right now. It’s a fearful environment. Everybody in leadership is afraid. … There’s no morale. Everybody is demoralized.”
White House official ‘eviscerated everyone’
ICE’s top 50 field officials were given roughly a week’s notice of an emergency meeting in Washington.
ICE’s 25 Enforcement Removal Operations, or ERO, field office directors and 25 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, special agents in charge flew into Washington and descended on the agency’s Washington headquarters last Tuesday, May 20. There, they were met by Miller, ICE confirmed to the Washington Examiner.
“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.
One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population.
“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official.
Later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem came in and addressed the dozens of top ICE officials.
“‘You guys are doing an OK job, but you’re not doing enough. You need to do more,’” the same official said.
An ICE spokesman told the Washington Examiner on Thursday afternoon that the statements from Miller were “inaccurate.” Other news outlets, including Axios, reported that it was a tense meeting with Miller and Noem last week.
“Stephen Miller did not say many of the things you state,” said Laszlo Baksay, ICE deputy assistant director of media affairs.
Baksay added that ICE arrested nearly 1,600 illegal immigrants on Wednesday, May 28, one of the highest days since Trump took office.
Miller did not respond to a request for comment. But he confirmed publicly that he had asked to triple the number of daily arrests of illegal immigrants.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day, and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day, so we can get all of the Biden illegals that were flooded into our country for four years out of our country,” Miller told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
The White House maintained that it intended to ensure Trump’s promises, including those on immigration, were carried out.
“Keeping President Trump’s promise to deport illegal aliens is something the administration takes seriously,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson wrote in an email. “We are committed to aggressively and efficiently removing illegal aliens from the United States, and ensuring our law enforcement officers have the resources necessary to do so. The safety of the American people depends upon it.”
Heads roll at ICE
In the fallout of that Tuesday meeting, ICE said it was undergoing a “leadership realignment to support its increasing operational tempo.”
Ken Genalo, acting executive associate director of ERO, will retire from his post and step down to the role of a special government employee. ICE cited it as a way for Genalo to spend more time with his family since he has been based in Washington since January.
A former senior DHS official with firsthand knowledge of Genalo’s forthcoming retirement disputed why Genalo was leaving.
“I believe this announcement is trying to put a spin on the changes; Ken was told he had to go,” the official wrote in a text message. “Ken retired when they told him they no longer wanted him as the EAD and they were not allowing him to return to NYC as the [field office director].”
Robert Hammer, the acting executive associate director of HSI, has been replaced by Derek Gordon, a lower-ranking HSI official. Hammer had overseen 10,000 employees tasked with carrying out major investigations into cross-border crimes.
The changes come as the White House continues to pressure ICE to turn up the numbers on arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants in the U.S. The agency announced eight new faces in leadership as part of its new direction.
Trump has promised to carry out the “largest-ever” deportation operation but is on track to come in below the highest year during the Obama administration.
ICE officers ‘need to be better’
The White House’s frustrations with ICE are not unfounded, according to the same three officials who spoke with the Washington Examiner.
ICE, as well as the DHS overall, could be doing a far better job coordinating who to arrest, how to transport people to detention centers, where to detain them, and final removal flights, the three agreed.
“There has been better coordination among FBI, [Drug Enforcement Administration], U.S. Marshals than I see within the DHS family,” the second official said.
“We all know that they are not meeting expectations. Some of it is atrophy. Some of it is lack of funding/jail space,” the third official wrote in a text message, adding they “need to be better.”
In one example, the third official said he had heard of instances in which ERO officers who were temporarily assigned to metropolitan cities to help existing officers arrest illegal immigrants have been “more interested in checking out local sights than doing the work.”
“These guys — it’s hard for them to step up and meet this moment because they’re just not that good,” the same person said.
ICE officers tasked with arresting and transporting illegal immigrants inside the U.S. have lamented internally about the massive task they have been assigned, the second official said. Agents from ICE HSI feel that making street arrests is below their pay grade, while ICE ERO officers feel too much is being asked of them, at a time when the White House keeps moving the goal post, according to two officials.
The second official said ICE officers making arrests have pushed back on having to accompany illegal immigrants on transport rides and flights to detention facilities once arrested, describing the tasks as menial and redundant.
Can money change things?
The three officials were not optimistic about how ICE would fare or how the deportations would pan out, but they said the anticipated infusion of cash through the “big, beautiful bill,” expected to go before the Senate this summer, would double ICE detention space from 50,000 beds to 100,000 beds.
The heavily populated coastal regions of the country have been targets for ICE arrests. The challenge has been the lack of detention space necessary to keep immigrants detained, preventing officers from continuing to make arrests.
That’s where the billions of dollars in cash will help, landing detention and transport contracts, and the plethora of other related costs associated with the deportation effort.
“If you don’t really want to try that hard, you’ve got lots of excuses because you’ve got no space,” the third official said. “If they don’t get better … then everybody will know … they’re just not good at what they do. They can’t perform at the level of expectation.”
The White House and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.
