The opening salvo of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has made immigrants across the United States fear that simply going to work, school, or the supermarket might result in a life-altering arrest.
Sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, real and imagined, are everywhere on social media. Teachers say students are panicked that ICE will take their parents while they’re in class. One Maryland doctor who treats patients with cancer and chronic pain from worksite injuries told me that many are skipping appointments. “They’re terrified,” he said.
That much, according to Trump officials, is going to plan, backed by a $200 million messaging campaign called “Stay Out and Leave Now.”
The results of the actual deportation push appear to be more modest, though not for lack of effort. ICE officers, some working six or seven days a week, made about 18,000 arrests last month, according to internal data I obtained. (ICE stopped publishing daily-arrest totals in early February as its numbers sagged.) By comparison, the agency tallied roughly 10,000 arrests in February 2024. The latest government data show that deportations were actually higher toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when ICE was removing a larger number of migrants picked up along the Mexico-U.S. border.
At its current pace, ICE is nowhere near delivering what Trump promised. The president made mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign and said during his inauguration speech that ICE would deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.” Vice President J. D. Vance said that the administration would “start with 1 million.” But ICE doesn’t have the resources or staffing to do what Trump wants. The agency has fewer than 6,000 enforcement officers nationwide. Much of their work is essentially immigration case management—ensuring compliance with court appointments and monitoring requirements—not kicking down doors in tactical gear or staging mass roundups in the streets.
ICE has never deported 1 million people in a year, let alone half that many. Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” who has been working out of an office at ICE headquarters in Washington, told me on Friday that the mass-deportation campaign remains on track and just needs Congress to cough up the money to allow it to kick into a higher gear.
Trump is happy with the results so far, Homan insisted. “The president has never told me he’s not happy,” Homan said. “I’m not happy.”
Administration officials are considering ways to help ICE boost its numbers, including legal tools to potentially give officers new authorities to enter homes. But in the meantime, the gap between Trump’s expectations and reality has senior officials in immigration enforcement on edge. The administration is churning through ICE leaders, blaming them for failing to deliver results. ICE staff members were stunned last month when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the demotion of the agency’s acting director, Caleb Vitello, barely a month into the job.
Vitello, a career ICE official who is also a certified mindfulness coach, had been viewed by his colleagues as a solid pick to steer the agency through a stressful time of intense scrutiny. He had worked in the White House with Stephen Miller during Trump’s first term. ICE officials figured he’d be as capable as anyone of managing the agency’s many masters—Miller, Noem, and Homan.
ICE started off the new administration with a conspicuous show of force, but the enforcement blitz soon began to fade. Vitello tried to issue daily quotas for the number of immigrants officers should arrest, but ICE teams were coming up short. They had burned through the lists of names and addresses they’d compiled prior to the inauguration, and they were too busy trying to make their quotas to research new targets. More and more people were refusing to answer the door when ICE knocked, leaving agents waiting outside.
The administration targeted several “sanctuary” cities that limit cooperation with ICE, but their big operations brought underwhelming results.
Noem blamed internal leaks and “crooked deep state agents” at the FBI for the relatively modest figures. It was a baffling claim. She and Homan had been conducting ICE raids on live television, even bringing along Dr. Phil to publicize the effort. Everyone knew they were coming.
On February 11, Noem ousted Vitello’s key deputies at ICE. Ten days later, she tried to demote Vitello. Noem wanted to bring in a trusted former aide and GOP political operative, Madison Sheahan, the head of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, who’d gotten that job in 2023 at age 26.
Noem wasn’t aware that ICE leadership roles typically require years of law enforcement or litigation experience, according to one senior DHS official who spoke with me on condition of anonymity. Although Sheahan had restored black-bear hunting to Louisiana and scored federal dollars for oyster farms, she wasn’t a lawyer or a cop. Vitello remained in the acting-director role, leaving ICE staff puzzled about who was in charge. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
On Sunday, two weeks after Vitello’s demotion was announced, ICE named a new acting director, Todd Lyons, a veteran official Noem had promoted less than a month earlier to oversee enforcement operations. Sheahan was named to the deputy-director role. Noem called the pair “work horses” who would deliver “results” and “achieve the American people’s mandate.”
The leadership stumbles point to the core problem with Trump’s grandiose deportation plan, which has the potential to become the “Build the Wall!” equivalent of his second term. Trump wants ICE to erase the immigration wave of the past decade and spearhead a MAGA social and cultural transformation. He has ordered federal law-enforcement agencies from across the government—the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals, even the FBI—to drop what they’re doing and help ICE catch more immigrants.
Homan’s mission is twofold: stopping illegal migration and ramping up deportations. One of those things is already undermining the other.
Illegal border crossings hit record levels under Biden but declined sharply last year as his administration shut off asylum access and worked with Mexico to crack down on unlawful crossings. Trump’s return to office—which has been accompanied by the deployment of thousands of U.S. soldiers and the threat of a one-way ticket to Guantánamo—has sent the border numbers plunging in recent weeks to levels not seen since the 1960s.
Fewer border crossings leaves ICE with a smaller number of easy deportees. That puts more of an onus on ICE to find deportees in U.S. cities and other communities nationwide, a much more resource-intensive task.
Not every ICE arrest leads to a deportation, and so far, Trump’s removal numbers are lagging behind last year’s, when Biden deported more than 271,000 people during the 2024 fiscal year, the highest total in a decade. Most of those deportees were migrants taken into custody along the Mexico-U.S. border, not immigrants arrested by ICE well inside the United States.
Homan was at ICE in 2012, when the agency set its high-water mark with 409,000 removals and Barack Obama was derided as the “deporter in chief” by immigrant advocates. Homan speaks of that era with nostalgia, a time before the sanctuary movement pushed Democratic mayors to eschew cooperation with ICE. During the past decade, the agency has lost much of its ability to work with police and jails in the big U.S. cities that ICE considers its most “target-rich” environments.
Now one of the challenges for Homan, Miller, and others is to get the president to turn his attention to enforcement metrics besides deportations, such as higher numbers of ICE arrests and fewer crossings at the Mexico-U.S. border.
“People have focused on deportations, but they got to remember we’ve secured the border,” Homan said. Under Biden, millions of migrants who crossed the Mexico-U.S. border were released into the United States with pending asylum claims and temporary residency, he noted. Biden curbed access last year, but Trump has ordered that the doors be slammed shut.
Yesterday, DHS said that it will roll out a new mobile-application tool called “CBP Home” for migrants to tell the government when they voluntarily leave the United States. Its name is a play on the CBP One app that Trump pilloried on the campaign trail: Biden officials used CBP One as a queue-management tool for asylum seekers and migrants from Mexico trying to schedule appointments to arrive at border crossings.
Trump has made CBP Home one more way to scare people into leaving. “Self-deportation is the safest option,” the department said when announcing the new app.
The administration is trying a variety of strategies to raise its deportation figures closer to what Trump wants. Other approaches for getting more aggressive are under review but haven’t been attempted yet.
Homan says that ICE’s “aperture”—the demographics of the immigrants it wants to arrest—will widen once the agency finishes tracking down “the worst of the worst.” ICE told Congress last summer that there were about 650,000 immigrants with criminal records on its docket—a pool of potential deportees large enough to keep officers busy, Homan said. ICE data show that the top-three criminal categories in that group are traffic offenses, which include drunk driving; immigration violations, such as illegally reentering the United States; and assault.
ICE officers have been ordered to drop Biden-era rules that took a hands-off approach to immigrants who lacked legal status but hadn’t committed crimes. An internal memo sent to ICE officers last month that I obtained has instructed the agency to arrest more of the immigrants who report at ICE offices for mandatory “check-ins” as part of the terms of their provisional status in the United States.
That includes immigrants who entered the U.S. legally under one of the Biden administration’s “lawful pathways” programs, if they haven’t already applied for asylum protections. And it directs officers to take a new look at immigrants who aren’t eligible for U.S. residency but whose deportations have been deferred because they are at risk of torture or persecution in their home country.
The ICE memo urges officers to assess whether those immigrants can be sent to third countries, as Trump officials secure deals with El Salvador, Guatemala, and others to take immigrants that the United States can’t easily deport.
The well-worn ICE tactic known as “knock and talk” that attempts to convince immigrants to open their door for officers has had diminishing returns as the publicity around the deportation campaign has left more potential deportees on guard. Officers can’t force their way into a residence without a criminal warrant signed by a judge—a message that advocacy groups and social-media users have disseminated widely. (Homan has called for the Justice Department to consider whether Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who share “know your rights” bulletins can be charged with impeding federal officers.)
Trump officials have been looking for a work-around to solve the problem of closed doors. Last month, DHS created a registration requirement for immigrants residing in the United States without legal status. Homan and two other DHS officials said that registry violations could allow ICE to bring criminal charges that would potentially give the agency a new way to enter a private residence without consent.
The administration is also working to get ICE more money, the lack of which has been perhaps the agency’s biggest impediment. Trump has backed a continuing resolution to fund the government through September that includes approximately $500 million in new money for ICE, equal to about 5 percent of the agency’s annual budget. The additional funds would allow ICE to continue adding detention capacity and removal flights incrementally, but they wouldn’t buy the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.
That’s the goal of the budget-reconciliation package that GOP lawmakers in the House and the Senate are negotiating with each other and intend to pass without Democratic votes.
The sums they’re discussing are staggering. The bill advanced by Senator Lindsey Graham, the budget-committee chairman, would provide $175 billion for border security and immigration enforcement, roughly 20 times ICE’s entire annual budget.
One Democratic Senate staffer tracking the bill told me that it’s likely months away from a vote but could be approved this summer. “It’s effectively a blank check,” said the staffer, who was not authorized to speak to reporters on the record.
The money could finance the expansion of ICE capacity from its current level of about 45,000 detainees a day to Homan’s goal of more than 100,000. Most important, it would allow ICE to channel federal dollars to pro-Trump states and counties, where the agency can train more sheriff’s deputies and other local cops to make immigration arrests. That’s when Trump’s mass-deportation campaign could get a mass-deportation force to carry it out.
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