In a tense meeting last week, top Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people a day, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.
The new target is triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making in the early days of Trump’s term — and suggests the president’s top immigration officials are full-steam ahead in pushing for mass deportations.
The increased pressure on agents comes as border-crossing numbers have been put in place in Trump’s first four months. It signals an increasingly aggressive approach to making arrests in non-border communities nationwide.
It also comes as the Trump administration’s heavy-handed tactics in rounding up unauthorized immigrants — and in some cases, legal residents and even U.S. citizens — appear to have contributed to President Trump’s slipping poll numbers on immigration.
Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff and leading architect of President Trump’s immigration policy, laid out into top immigration officials during the May 21 meeting at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters in D.C., according to four people familiar with the meeting.
Miller demanded that field office directors and special agents in charge get arrest and deportation numbers up as much as possible, pointing to the waves of unauthorized immigrants who were able to enter the U.S. during the Biden administration.
Noem took a milder approach in pushing for more arrests, requesting feedback from ICE leaders. Special government employee Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign aide, also spoke.
Miller’s directive and tone had people leaving the meeting feeling their jobs could be in jeopardy if the new targets weren’t reached, two of the sources said. A third person said Miller was trying to motivate people with a harsh tone.
It’s not the first time Miller has yelled at senior DHS officials about getting arrest and deportation numbers up, sources said.
Immigration officers have almost 49,000 people in ICE custody, according to the latest government data from early May. That’s significantly more people in detention than what Congress has appropriated funding to accommodate.
But even as the Trump administration has carried out a series of controversial deportation flights to other nations, deportation totals are roughly the same as they were during President Biden’s last year in office.
Border-area deportations are lower because fewer migrants are attempting to cross into the U.S., while ICE’s removals from the country’s interior have increased, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), an independent organization.
