President Donald Trump is reportedly upset that immigration officials have failed to meet his campaign promise of carrying out the largest deportation operation in US history within days of taking office.
“It’s driving him nuts that they’re not deporting more people,” a source familiar with internal immigration discussions told NBC News.
The White House disputed the report.
“Hundreds of violent, predatory, and gang-affiliated criminal illegal aliens have already been rounded up and deported by ICE since President Trump took office — and the Trump administration is aligned on securing our borders and ensuring that mass deportations are conducted quickly and effectively to put Americans and America First,” according to a release.
Immigration officials have reportedly been told to make between 1,200 and 1,500 arrests per day, with 75 at each of the 25 Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices. However, even that level of daily enforcement would be insufficient to meet Trump’s promise to deport “millions and millions” of people upon taking office.
According to publicly available data, the agency’s highest single-day total was 1,100 arrests, despite consistently failing to reach 1,000.
As of the beginning of this week, approximately 8,000 people had been arrested, with raids taking place in major metro areas including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Denver.
This week, the first “high threat” deportees arrived for detention at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The administration has released nearly 500 of those arrested back into the United States, citing limited detention capacity and federal court rulings that limit the amount of time migrants can be held if their home countries refuse to accept them.
The administration has offered several explanations for the slower-than-expected rate of immigration arrests.
Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested earlier this week that leakers, protesters, and sympathetic members of the press were destroying the element of surprise for certain operations, following a massive Colorado raid intended to target over 100 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which drew public attention but reportedly resulted in only 30 arrests and a single confirmed gang member.
According to Horman, the pace of arrests will increase once immigration officials have processed the smaller number of high-risk individuals and expanded to people accused of lower-level offenses.
“Right now, it’s countering public safety and national security threats,” Homan told ABC News. “Because that’s a smaller population, we’ll prioritize this, as President Trump has promised. However, as that aperture opens, more arrests will occur across the country.”
The recent passage of the Laken Riley Act, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain migrants accused but not yet convicted of lower-level offenses such as shoplifting, will help the new administration’s deportation efforts.
Civil rights advocates, such as the ACLU, have warned that the bill, named after a young woman killed by an undocumented migrant from Venezuela, is “a serious threat to civil liberties that would inflict damage on an already taxed immigration system, invite racial profiling of longtime residents, and violate bedrock constitutional principles.”
The Trump administration has also repealed previous directives prohibiting immigration agents from making arrests in sensitive areas such as schools and churches.
Despite both Trump terms’ emphasis on immigration, data show that the Biden administration deported more people per year at its peak than any other in the last decade, including Trump.
