Markwayne Mullin made clear from the start of his tenure as secretary that he wanted the Department of Homeland Security to stay out of the headlines and adopt a quieter approach after a tumultuous year under his predecessor, Kristi Noem.
He paused plans to convert industrial warehouses into immigrant detention centers. Immigration agents have been told to stop entering homes without judicial warrants. His department has tried to rebrand Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as “NICE” officers, at the urging of President Trump.
The change in tactics stemmed from fears within the Republican Party that the crackdown could cost them voters in this year’s midterm elections. But the image overhaul has drawn backlash from some ardent Trump supporters who want the administration to dramatically ramp up arrests and broaden its focus beyond immigrants with criminal records. And it has raised questions about the direction of the department as Mr. Mullin and White House officials send mixed signals about how aggressively they plan to deliver on Mr. Trump’s signature campaign promise of mass deportations.
“I don’t know how you do a mass deportation program quietly,” said Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, which was formed as a branch of the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The president ran loudly on it. I don’t think it’s something to shy away from.”
White House officials have rejected claims they’re softening on immigration.
“For the people out there saying, ‘President Trump’s getting weak on mass deportation,’ you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix this week.
“This year will be a good year,” Mr. Homan added. “Mass deportations are coming.”
Mr. Homan also pledged to deploy scores of immigration agents to New York if lawmakers passed measures that restricted state and local officials from cooperating with ICE. Mr. Mullin later backed his claims and said the department was “not slowing down one bit,” even as ICE data showed a recent dip in arrests.
But Mr. Mullin has taken pains in interviews to make clear the department is targeting what it calls the “worst of the worst” and moving away from the more indiscriminate tactics that swept up many noncriminals in major cities. He has said Americans would not see a repeat of the Minnesota operation, which drew widespread backlash after two U.S. citizens were fatally shot by immigration officers amid protests.
“We’re not going into New York like another Minneapolis,” Mr. Mullin said in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday. “We’re going to go after the felons.”
At the same time, administration officials have tried to appease conservatives by repeatedly saying that no immigrants will be off the table if they are found living in the country illegally.
Recent polling has continued to show that most Americans say the federal government has gone too far in its efforts to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants. But a growing share of Republicans now say the administration is doing too little on deportations, according to a poll released by the Pew Research Center on Monday.
In a statement, the White House denied that the administration was significantly altering its approach to immigration enforcement. “Nobody is changing the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities.”
The Homeland Security Department also emphasized that it was not scaling back. “ICE is NOT slowing down,” Lauren Bis, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement.
The latest public data from ICE through early April show that daily average arrests have dipped to about 1,000, from a peak of about 1,500 in January amid the crackdown in Minnesota. That 1,000 arrests a day was about four times higher than during the last year of the Biden administration, when about 250 people a day were detained by ICE.
During the first year of the second Trump administration, the federal government deported about 230,000 people who had been arrested inside the country and another 270,000 at the border, a New York Times analysis of federal data showed. The number of deportations from interior arrests alone surpassed the total during the entire four years of the Biden administration.
“While I’m glad Homan said the words ‘mass deportation,’ which is important, the measure of whether they’re doing it or not isn’t rhetoric,” said Mr. Howell, who is also leading a recently formed group called the Mass Deportation Coalition. “It’s numbers. And the deportation numbers do not appear to be on a trajectory that is increasing toward mass deportation yet.”
Mr. Howell and other conservatives have urged the administration to ramp up enforcement at work sites, which they see as a crucial way to target more undocumented immigrants.
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors lower immigration rates, said that most people living in the country illegally were not getting arrested on charges of murders and other serious crimes, meaning it would be more effective to root out large numbers of unauthorized immigrants at their workplaces.
“What I’m looking for is not just stepped-up activity in taking arrested suspects off the hands of local sheriff’s departments,” Mr. Krikorian said. “The key is whether they step up work-related enforcement.”
But conservatives have expressed skepticism that the administration will follow through on that, given that Mr. Trump has at times walked back immigration policies that have conflicted with his economic agenda.
“I think the obstacle here is the president,” Mr. Krikorian said. “He doesn’t want to inconvenience businessmen.”
Some conservatives said that they were optimistic about the department’s direction under Mr. Mullin, and that they thought it made sense for ICE to operate more quietly.
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, an acting deputy homeland security secretary during the first Trump administration, said that setting up confrontations ahead of time by loudly announcing agents’ presence in a particular region reduces the efficiency of operations.
“It increases danger to both agents and officers as well as the public in general,” Mr. Cuccinelli said. “None of those are positives.”
Albert Sun, Allison McCann and Bora Erden contributed reporting.
Madeleine Ngo covers immigration and economic policy for The Times.
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