President Donald Trump is reportedly fuming that immigration officials haven’t been able to meet his campaign promise of carrying out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history within days of taking office.
“It’s driving him nuts 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,” it said in a statement.
Immigration officials have reportedly been told to achieve between 1,200 and 1,500 arrests a day, with 75 in each of the 25 Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices. However, even that level of daily enforcement wouldn’t be enough to meet Trump’s promises to deport “millions and millions” of people upon taking office.
According to publicly released figures, the agency’s highest single-day total was 1,100 arrests, though it regularly fails to crack 1,000.
As of the beginning of this week, roughly 8,000 in total had been arrested, with raids taking place across major metro areas such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Denver.
The first “high threat” deportees arrived this week for detention at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The administration has released nearly 500 of those arrested back into the U.S., as immigration officials face limited detention capacity and federal court cases capping the time migrants can be held if their countries refuse to take them back.
The administration has claimed multiple explanations for the slower-than-promised pace of immigration arrests.
Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested earlier this week that leakers, protesters and sympathetic members of the press were spoiling the element of surprise for certain operations, after a mass Colorado raid intended to target over 100 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua attracted public attention and reportedly netted just 30 arrests, with a single confirmed gang member.
Horman said that the pace of arrests will ramp up once immigration officials work through the smaller number of high-threat individuals and expand to people accused of lower-level offenses.
“Right now, it’s countering public safety threats, national security threats,” Homan told ABC News. “That’s a smaller population, so we’re going to do this on priority based as President Trump promised. But as that aperture opens, there’ll be more arrests nationwide.”
The new administration will be aided in its deportation push by 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.
Civil rights advocates such as the ACLU have warned the bill, named after a young woman killed by an undocumented migrant from Venezuela, is a “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 thrown out previous directives that barred immigration agents from making arrests at sensitive locations such as schools and churches.
Despite both Trump terms’ focus on immigration, data shows the Biden administration deported more people annually at its peak than any other in the last decade, including Trump.
