New York Times: The View From Inside Trump’s D.H.S.
Before the 2024 election, about three-quarters of Americans believed that the U.S. immigration system was broken. Large majorities in both political parties said the Biden administration badly mishandled the surge of undocumented migrants into the country after the onset of the pandemic. Though President Joe Biden took steps to sharply reduce the numbers in his last months in office, frustration over immigration helped catapult Donald Trump back into the White House.
On Day 1 of his presidency, the Trump administration began the harshest crackdown on immigrants inside the country since the 1950s. Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland security adviser and the architect of his immigration policy, set a target of 3,000 arrests a day and one million deportations a year.
The administration has argued in court that nearly everyone who illegally crosses the border is subject to mandatory detention and has fired more than 100 immigration judges it viewed as lenient. Most controversially, Trump ordered surges of thousands of immigration enforcement agents in U.S. cities, leading to declining approval ratings, mass protests and the fatal shootings of two American citizens by federal agents.
The main engine of Trump’s enforcement campaign is the Department of Homeland Security. To understand how the agency has transformed, we interviewed more than 80 former and current D.H.S. employees, as well as officials in the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts. Many of them supported increased enforcement but criticized the administration’s execution, aspects of which they characterized as chaotic, dangerous and ineffective.
Career employees described experiencing a frustrating sense of whiplash as immigration policy has swung back and forth between Republican and Democratic administrations. The root of the problem, as they see it, is the failure of Congress over many decades to pass new laws that address today’s realities. In February, the Department of Homeland Security shut down after Congress failed to reach a deal on Democrats’ proposed changes to enforcement tactics.
D.H.S. policies bar employees from speaking to the news media without authorization. Some of our sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from the administration. We corroborated their descriptions of specific incidents with colleagues, contemporaneous notes and court documents. Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, former Secretary Kristi Noem and other agency leaders declined our requests for interviews. We also sent the department detailed questions.
In response to a request for comment, Lauren Bis, acting assistant secretary of public affairs at D.H.S., wrote in an email that federal immigration officers are arresting “the worst of the worst including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members and terrorists,” while facing “a coordinated campaign of violence against them.”
A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, also responded to a request for comment. “President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities,” she wrote in an email. “As the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said, approximately 70 percent of deportations to date have been illegal aliens with criminal records.”
The government’s own records complicate that picture. Only about 5 percent of people booked into ICE custody in the last year have been convicted of a violent crime. The number of arrests of people with violent convictions has increased by 37 percent under Trump, while the number of arrests of those with no conviction of any kind has risen by 770 percent, according to ICE data. Many agents and officials we spoke to say the relentless pursuit of deportations is unsustainable and has compromised the department.