WASHINGTON — Agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are under increasing pressure to boost the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants, as President Donald Trump has expressed anger that the amount of people deported in the first weeks of his administration is not higher, according to three sources familiar with the discussions at ICE and the White House.
A source familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is getting “angry” that more people are not being deported and that the message is being passed along to "border czar" Tom Homan, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello.
“It’s driving him nuts they’re not deporting more people,” said the person familiar with Trump’s thinking.
“After four years of the Biden administration’s outright incompetence and negligence, the Trump administration has re-established a no-nonsense enforcement of and respect for the immigration laws of the United States,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “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.”
A source familiar with internal conversations at ICE said Homan has a daily conference call with ICE agents in which he has been known to express his frustration with ICE numbers.
Another source said Homan is “unhappy” and has “made his unhappiness known” about the relatively low numbers of arrests and deportations.
Meanwhile at ICE, Vitello told agents in January to aim to meet a daily quota of 1,200-1,400 arrests. According to numbers ICE has posted on X, the highest single day total since Trump was inaugurated was just 1,100, and the number has fallen since that day. On Tuesday of this week, arrests of immigrants were over 800, according to a source familiar with the numbers. But last weekend, there were only about 300 arrests, another source told NBC News.
In order to fulfill Trump’s Inauguration Day promise of “millions and millions” of deportations, the Trump administration would have to be deporting over 2,700 immigrants every day to reach 1 million in a year.
And, as NBC News has reported, arrests do not always equal immediate detentions, much less deportations. Of the more than 8,000 immigrants arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration, 461 were released, according to the White House.
