The Trump administration is planning to revamp the leadership of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to reports, as the government seeks to intensify its mass deportation efforts.
Multiple news outlets have reported that the government intends to reassign multiple directors of ICE field offices in the coming days, potentially replacing them with border patrol officials.
It comes as the government is falling well short of its targets on immigration. Earlier this year, Stephen Miller – Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff – set ICE a target of arresting 3,000 people every day. But as of late September, the agency on average was arresting 1,178 daily, NBC reported.
The New York Times reported that the proposed changes stem from the White House becoming frustrated at the pace of deportations, which now lags behind Trump’s goal of removing 1 million immigrants in his first year in office.
The administration is seeking to replace “at least a dozen” directors of ICE field offices, NBC reported. The move would represent a major shake-up, given ICE only has 25 field offices across the country.
Officials told NBC that several of the ICE directors would be replaced by border patrol agents.
The border patrol has been criticized after conducting aggressive, large-scale arrests in Chicago and Los Angeles. The agency is ostensibly supposed to operate along the US borders with Mexico and Canada.
In August, border patrol agents jumped out of a rental truck and raided a Home Depot parking lot in LA, arresting more than a dozen people. Earlier in October, a border patrol agent shot a woman five times in Chicago. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the woman, a US citizen, drove into a border patrol vehicle.
The DHS, which oversees ICE and the border patrol, said in a statement:
“This is one team, one fight … We have no personnel changes to announce right now but we remain laser focused on results and we will deliver.”
