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President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to replace almost half of its regional ICE directors with their Border Patrol counterparts as part of a major shake up of the leadership of its illegal immigration crackdown, according to reports.
The administration has grown increasingly frustrated with ICE’s failure to meet White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s target of 3,000 arrests of undocumented migrants per day, The New York Times reports.
The latest figures available, compiled prior to the government shutdown, recorded an average arrest rate of 1,178 per day in September, well below Miller’s expectations.
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A man seeking asylum from Colombia is detained by federal agents as he attends his court hearing in immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City (Getty)
The development came as California Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal took to X to announce the latest death of a detainee in ICE custody, placing further pressure on the much-criticized immigration enforcement agency.
“That is 22 immigrants who have died in custody since Trump came to office,” the congresswoman wrote. “This is beyond outrageous. ICE is responsible for the well-being of people in immigration detention and it is failing miserably.”
The Independent has contacted ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the NYT: “The president’s entire team is working in lockstep to implement the president’s policy agenda, and the tremendous results from securing the border to deporting criminal illegal aliens speak for themselves.”
The Trump administration’s decision to swap out ICE field directors with replacements from Customs and Border Patrol was inspired by the president’s top aides being impressed by the latter’s “more aggressive tactics to secure arrests,” NBC reports, “such as rappelling into apartment buildings from Black Hawk helicopters and jumping out of rental trucks in Home Depot parking lots.”
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A Border Patrol agent among protesters at Coast Guard Base Alameda in Oakland, California (AP)
“The mentality is CBP does what they’re told, and the administration thinks ICE isn’t getting the job done,” a DHS official told NBC. “So CBP will do it.”
The network reports that the White House has signed off on a list of at least a dozen directors of ICE field offices it intends to remove imminently, half of whom would be replaced by CBP personnel.
Given that there are only 25 ICE field offices across the U.S., the substitutions would mean almost half of its leadership being benched.
The list of replacements, who have not been named, was reportedly drawn up by DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski and CBP chief Greg Bovino, who has overseen his agents’ operations in Los Angeles and Chicago.
The reported dissatisfaction with ICE comes after it was revealed that the agency had spent $70 million on weapons in the first nine months of Trump’s second term, a 700 percent increase on the amount spent in Joe Biden’s final year in office, as its role has dramatically increased to help deliver the “largest mass deportation program in history” as the president promised on the campaign trail.
The 20,000-strong agency has also been the subject of a major recruitment drive, with Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin recently claiming ICE had received “more than 175,000 applications” to join its ranks as a result of an ad blitz on platforms like Spotify, X, Meta, YouTube, and LinkedIn, with “more than 18,000 tentative job offers” issued.
